Book Reviewlet: Logicomix

What is Logicomix about? In 3 words: Godel, Escher, Bach. Of those 3 people, only the first appears in Logicomix, but like the Hofstadtler book by the same name, Logicomix is a comic book about the connections between the fundamental incompleteness of math (Godel), how we use paradox to understand that incompleteness (Escher), and how art reflects how humans can transcend logic (Bach).

On the surface, Logicomix is about the life of Brittish mathematician Bertrand Russell, drawn in a sophisticated and nuanced version of the art seen in Tintin. But really, is is trying to use a comic book story to convey deep ideas about the nature (limits) of logic/reason/mathematics and the nature of humanity.

In much the same way, Hofstadtler's Godel, Escher, Bach used stories about the Tortoise and Achilles to illustrate many of the same ideas for his textbook, and Stephenson uses pulp thriller fiction (using many of the same characters like Leibniz and Turing) to explore the same ideas.

The comic book format doesn't allow Doxiadis and Papadimitriou's Logicomix to explore the topic as deeply, but it may make it much more successful in reaching a larger audience.

In various ways, I have been reading about these ideas for a very long time, in theoretical computer science summer courses in middle school where we learned about the foundations of arithmatic and Cantor diagonolization, reading Marvin Gardner's Aha and Gotcha around the same time, thinking about the limits of utopia reading Huxley's Brave New World in high school, learning set theory freshman year, to learning about the limits of rational choice theory (e.g. reading Scott's Seeing Like a State) in grad school.

Unlike Stephenson's novels which pressuposes a lot of this background, Logicomix tries to address the ideas to someone who perhaps never liked math, and I think ultimately succeeds. For me personally it lacked some of the depth of say Asterios Polyp which used comics to explore the nature of art and humanity. But that may just be because I haven't really thought as much about art before, and thus I am probably the wrong audience for Logicomix.

My first real tweet: Does being #vegan and #prochoice make you a hypocrite?

Usually stuff I want to post requires more than 140 characters, but "Does being #vegan and #prochoice make you a hypocrite?" was idea that I was contemplating after a recent NY Times on why killing plants is as unethical as killing animals, that I didn't have anything else to add.

I don't really twitter much, since few of my friends use it, but created the account long ago mostly just to stake out a username in case I had some need in the future. Had to settle on ho_ben since every other permutation of my name that I could think of was taken.

how smart was issac newton?

Marginal Revolution asks what is the probability the person with the most chess aptitude in the world today actually knows how to play chess. The question is how much wasted potential there is out there because people with high aptitude never get the resources to take advantage of that aptitude.

I often think about this type of analysis when trying to figure out how smart Issac Newton was. Sure he had the most success of math as anyone of his day (by a bit, Leibniz discovered much of the same shortly after him), but he was only the best out of the very small set of people born who had access to the resources to become good at math. Let's say 100,000 at the most, or the top 0.001 percentile. Being in the 0.001 percentile these days means there are tens of thousands of people better than you at math in the world, and thus is probably not good enough to get you into a good graduate program in math these days.

The Ethics of Killing Brussels Sprouts: And the Ethics of Climate Change

In Krugman's obituary for Paul Samuelson, he mentioned that one of his contributions is he clarified the idea of welfare for economists, and the common good. Economists have a very well defined notion of social welfare, that is entirely human centric, but at least it is clear and well defined.

I do concede that animals and plants must fit in there somewhere, but since I have yet to come across a good definition, I tend not to use use it.

This interesting nytimes article questions whether killing brussels sprouts is any better than killing a pig for food?

This is particularly relevant when it comes to the issue of climate change, since if we just consider the impact of humans, climate change has arguably negligible impact 0 +/- 2% of GDP say the best estimates (of course extreme events are possible). But the impact on plants and animals is tricky. Many animals will die, though plants on the whole stand to benefit. And was it wrong for say the mammals to kill the dinosaurs (as some theories suggest)?

My Kindle DX Thoughts

Many have asked in various forums for thoughts on the Kindle. Here they are in one place. I mostly got the Kindle DX for work (to read Pdf's). For that, it is passably ok. I have been able to cut down on the stacks of printouts I normally carry around. It is nice for a student to e-mail me a document, and then I can just forward his e-mail to my kindle, and be able to access it just like that. It is annoying there is no folder system (though I wrote a perl script that fakes it reasonably well). Another feature that is useful for commutes is that it can read stuff aloud, which is useful to catch up on random papers, during my long commutes. But the main annoyance is that it is quite slow. Too slow to page quickly through and the keyboard is a bit too fiddly and search too slow. It comes up when trying to find a particular table in a paper, or for paging through the couple magazines I subscribe to that offer pdf versions.

I await new versions with hopefully better contrast, faster load times, touch screen (like the Sony version), and even color, and better keyboard.

It is still pretty great for its main purpose, which is reading novels. For the Kindle formatting books, the contrast is not a problem, the screen is definitely easier to read that a computer screen, and it is so nice to be able to impulse buy books, like iphone apps, and have them right away. Amazon claims that of books that have kindle versions, 40% of its sales are electronic, which I can believe. Formatting is still a bit off, and annoying you can't page through easily, but generally fine for just reading.

Oh, and battery life is awesome. It goes for weeks between charges.

Bottom line, I wouldn't get it yet, I'd wait for a newer version given its hefty price tag. But I have no regrets given it came out of my research budget.

E-mail Storms

A friend of mine was recently complaining about someone who e-mailed a large distribution list and the two people who hit reply-all.

Reminded me of the early days of e-mail back in the 1990's when such things could last for days and span hundreds of e-mail, when there were mysterious lists that had hundreds of people, and someone would hit reply-all, and and then someone else would hit reply all to tell people not to hit reply-all, and then people would hit reply all to that to lament about the irony, and then lots of people would start hitting reply all out of annoyance to tell people to shut up, and then people would hit reply all to just be part of this weird social phenomenon.

Ah, good times. I haven't seen that in a long time. Always interesting how society interacts with a new technology.

Books that my Kids will definitely be reading: Gardner's AHA and Gotcha!

Well they'll definitely be getting a copy. Who knows if they will actually read them. But these were two of my favorite books as a kid. I was reminded by a recent nytimes blog post about their author Martin Gardner. They really got me excited about math (using comic strips) but using serious math, applying number theory and topological fixed point theorems and things that gave me a second Aha when I learned about them again in grad school.

One I pondered for a long time and still occasionally do was the Pop-Quiz paradox. I recall seeing a resolution in college, and recall trying to apply the epistemic game theory I learned in grad school to the problem. The neat thing is that these ideas have stayed with me throughout and my appreciation has only gotten deeper with time.

I also first encountered the Monty Hall Problem there.

Another that stays with me (which in grad school I learned is an application of a fixed point theorem) is to think about somebody hiking up a mountain. She starts a 9am and arrives at 5pm. She camps out on top, and then starts walking down the same path at 9am, and arrives at the bottom at 5pm. The interesting question: Is there a time when she is at exactly the same point on the mountain at exactly the same time of day.

The answer it is revealed is yes. And you can see this by envisioning a video of the mountain as she walks up and a video of the mountain as she walk down. And then projecting the video simulatenously onto the same screen. At some point she will have to intersect herself.

The same idea can be applied to show that if you take a piece of paper that lying flat, completely fills the bottom of a box. Then you can pick it up and crumple it up however you want. There will always be some point of the paper that is exactly above where it was before when it was lying flat. Alternatively, you also know that at any given time, there is some point on the earth that is the exact same temperature as the point directly opposite it on the other side of the planet.

I remember learning about multiple infinities, and the difference between countable and uncountable.

And the best thing was they were all done in cartoon form. I loved the stick figures and the blatant asymmetric shapes. Ah great memories.

Augmented Reality on iPhone

Augmented reality is another one of those technologies that I saw demoed at the Media Lab way back in 1997, and finally in 2009 it gets commercialized. (The Kindle and eInk was the other example).

But the new iphone augmented reality apps offers tremendous potential. Yelp already lets you point your iphone camera at stores or restaurants, and it will annotate the image with information about the store. I'm sure Google Earth will soon do the same with even more info including wikipedia entries and photos.

It's like those fancy head's up displays in military aircraft.

But the gaming potential is neat. This upcoming game will put invisible aliens in the world around you, visible only when peering through your iphone screen (like the special sunglasses in that old 80's movie), which you shoot by pointing your phone at them.

Taking advantage of the fact that iPhones connect to the Internet is even more impressive. The video showed shooting aliens in the world around you, but you could also shoot other people also logged in. Your screen revealing the hidden players amongst the people around you. You could play a real FPS in your office or outside in a field. Literally run over powerups, get healed at certain stations, get special weapons, shoot things in the environment like cars to make them blow up, etc. A bunch of Stanford kids tried something similar without the fancy video a year ago, that didn't catch on, and probably the tech is still too slow to really do this well, but it is not far away.

Blame Obama (Michelle) for the lack of Tomatoes

One of the joys of moving to Ithaca is simply sublime tomatoes. My roommate in grad school introduced me to "real" tomatoes late in life, with a tomato picked up from Berkeley. I felt like a Platonic cave dweller, for the first time exposed to the true thing. I quickly learned that such perfection is really only available a month or two during the year, and only available from serendipity. Even some of the best restaurants I've been to have not been able to deliver a consistent tomato experience. But Ithaca in late August was always a heavenly time where visits to the farmer's market will yield a pretty good shot at a great tomato (eaten by itself, or maybe toasted with fresh basil and mozzarella on a slice of ciabatta). Not so this year. Most of the north east crop apparently has succumbed to the Blight (a variant to what caused the Irish Potato famine).

Dan Barber - Owner and Chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns (the current contender for the "it" celebrity chef, only chef on Time's 100 most influential list, and probably the chef of the best meal I've ever had) offers an interesting reason why... the expansion of gardening, promoted in part by Michelle Obama which has led to a greater dispersal of globalized tomato plants to untrained amateur home gardens who increased the geographical reach of the disease, but also led to more grown by people who didn't know how to identify and deal with it. To be fair, I think Barber supports very much the trend of home gardening, but still an interesting story.

On the latest guest columnist at the NYTimes: They have a point.

I used to complain about people using They as a substitute for he/she (or the more compact s/he). Which is strange for me, because I tend to be a descriptivist when it comes to language rather than a prescriptivist. But at some point, I caught a NY Times article using They for the singular. which bugged me. This new column argues that using They as singular was common until a feminist grammarian in the 1800's convinced everyone to use He for the genderless singular pronoun.

Up to grad school, I still stuck to the old rules and used he exclusively, but that raised the umbrage of a feminist education prof of mine, so I have adopted the economics standard of alternating, though that normally means defaulting to she especially for people in positions of power. Now, it is nice to know that maybe using They is ok.

And come to think of it, at some point, it became ok to use the 2nd person plural as a singular (You used to be plural, Thee and Thou was the singular form). So why not use They for the singular as well.

(I used to stick to using he/him exclusively as I had been taught in grade school until getting chastised by a feminist professor in grad school, so now I adopt the alternation which seems to be the norm in economics [the norm also requires the gendered pronoun used to defy stereotypes. For example, the manager is always a she])

The secret to losing weight

Recently people have emphasized the formula:

[calories eaten minus calories burnt] times 3500 = change in lbs of weight

Which is fine, and a useful tautology to start with, but people interpret this the wrong way.

Time magazine recently came down on the side that reducing calories eaten is all that matters, though others have argued that increasing calories burnt through exercise is all that matters.

The problem is that all of these things are missing a third factor, metabolism. which we don't directly control, but is probably far more important than the other two.

The typical American gains about one pound a year. That corresponds to 3500 calories.

That means over the course of a year where we typically eat around 1 million calories, the difference between calories eaten and calories burnt is only 3500, or or about 0.3%

I do believe that we probably have a fair amount of control over how many calories we eat (not complete, but fair). However, I find it hard to believe that somehow our conscious self manages our activity level to be within 100.3% of that calorie level. Clearly automatic mechanisms in the body are kicking in that regulates how fast we are burning calories.

Thus, as the Time magazine article points out, it is not at all clear that exercise increases calories burnt. It does while you are exercising, but if it causes those automatic mechanisms for metabolism to slow down for the rest of the day, then exercising would achieve nothing at all.

So that's the secret. Find a way to adjust that automatic mechanism and the path to weight loss is clear. Just don't ask me how to do that.

Two recent comics that amused me

This first is a mixture of romance and complete dorkiness which is exactly why I like xkcd.

The second, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, is a comic I just started reading and impressively manages to put up consistently funny usually dorky (often dark) punch lines on a daily basis.

Chance Encounters

(back from Asia, so will return to posting the backlog of posts I have)

A friend of mine related to me a few stories of random encounters with people he had not heard from in years. My response is that this happens so often, I am no longer surprised.

A girl I was in marching band with in high school in new jersey, who I never kept in touch with, I later bumped into on a random vacaction in banff canada, and then years later, she turns up as a student at the orientation picnic in the MBA program I teach in.

A key paper I cite in my dissertation, turns out to be written by one of R-'s classmate in med school, who wrote the paper with a darthmouth econ professor, and two weeks ago, the econ prof shows up to give a talk at Cornell. That econ prof's normal collaborator is the economist I worked with at the White House, who went to the same summer school I did in high school, which we found out since we were both being interviewed by the summer school director in the same week.

Sitting in a random starbucks in the upper west side in new york city, there were limited seats, so I shared a table with a guy who asked to borrow the book review from the sunday nytimes I was reading. He was looking for the review of a book he publishes. turns out he's a book agent for social science books. 3 days later, I am having dinner with a visiting harvard prof back in Ithaca, who is talking about his book agent, who sure enough is the guy I chatted with back at Starbucks.

A friend of mine from college, whom I hadn't seen or talked to since college turned out to live on my street in baltimore.

So what are the odds? I guess physicists call this a Fermi problem.

So let's say you have 4,000 acquaintances that you'd recognize and remember. (My high school had 300 people per class, I'd probably recognize all of them, plus a few hundred from adjacent classes. say 1000 total. then 1000 from college. 1000 from grad school. 1000 from work and otherwise).

Assuming most are yuppies, there are maybe 100,000 students who went to a top college per year. so 1,000,000 people within 5 years of you. so you probably know 0.4% of them. and if you include friends of friends, that's probably lots more. so given that you see say 50 yuppies in any given day, you have a 20% (50 * 0.4%) chance of bumping into a random person on any given day in a new place. Which doesn't sound too far off.

Humans Can Multi-task!

Lifestyle gurus these days love talking about how multi-tasking is a myth, that people can't multi-task, but instead, just switch their attention rapidly between different tasks. And therefore we should do only one thing at a time.

Idiots.

That is multi-tasking. At least that's how computers do multi-tasking. (ok, there are exceptions, especially as computers take advantage of multiple processors) but that is by and large how all personal computers have handled multi-tasking. (that was one of the first lessons I learned about computers back when we were first upgrading from DOS to Windows 3.0... not even 3.1).

And if that kind of multi-tasking has worked for computers, I don't see why that's an argument that humans can't do the same.

It isn't Easy being Green: and how feel-good environmentalism is usually dumb

In class, I talk about how hard it is to figure out which activities are good for the environment, once the entire supply chain is factored in. And how common strategies to reduce your footprint are often dumb. In class, I talk about how ridiculous policies like banning bottled water (ala San Francisco) or banning air conditioning (Japanese government) are just incredibly dumb.

Part of the problem is that once you calculate the entire supply chain, it is unclear what practice is better for the environment. This recent nytimes article argues that steel water bottles are better than disposable plastic if you use it at least 50 times, though if you read the article carefully, if you wash your water bottle with hot water, then there is no benefit at all. The same is true for local food. Though you are not shipping your produce from Mexico, the fact that local food is often brought in smaller trucks and you drive more to buy it, means it is often worse for the environment.

The other part of the problem is that there are much cheaper and simpler ways to help the environment. For example, for about $20 you can take a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Companies like Terra Pass will take your money and use it to plant trees or reduce landfill emissions or buy more fuel efficient stoves in poor countries.

So yes, you can reduce your carbon footprint by about a ton a year if you give up meat, or you can achieve the same effect for $20. If you value meat at less than $20 per year, than go ahead, but otherwise, that's not the best approach. There are of course other reasons to be vegetarian, just like I love local food.

Given the complexities, how do we make figure out what's right. Of course the easy economic approach is to make sure you pay for the carbon you are responsible for. This can be accomplished most simply with a carbon tax, or a little less simply with the cap and trade proposals currently on the table. That way all you have to worry about is the price, which encapsulates all the environmental costs within it.

Play Magazine - RIP

Play magazine appears to be a casualty of the financial crisis which has hit the newspaper industry hard. And that is quite sad. Play is one of the magazines that the New York Times puts out 4 or so times each year, so that on any given Sunday, the New York Times comes both with its main magazine, and one of its targeted ones (e.g. Travel, Design, Style, etc.) and Play which covered Sports. The magazines are the main reason I subscribe to the Times.

I was recently reminded how way out of touch with sports I've become, while watching the superbowl. Back in college, still most of my friends followed sports, so I wound up watching as well, or at least keeping up so that I could talk about it. But for the past 8 years, I guess I've mostly been hanging out with academic types, who never talk about sports, which I'm cool with, but Play magazine was a nice way to stay somewhat in touch.

Play magazine was basically the sports magazine for over intelectualizing npr/nytimes readers. Its writers included people like David Foster Wallace and Steve Levitt who looked at how sports betting worked. Its articles dissected plays, analyzed the game theory of football play calling, and the physiology of sports.

You can see evidence of the cancellation by the articles appearing the regular magazine: the business of Roller Derby, or the use of serious statistics to analyze basketball; the article on NBA star Shane Battier by Michael Lewis was as much a lesson on conditional probability and marginal analysis as it was about basketball. So at least the articles are still being written hopefully.

Oh, and the magazine was pretty.

Great stuff. But I guess not much of a market. Ah well.

The virtues of Vista and the bounds of Smart Computing

I've been meaning to write an entry extolling the virtues of Windows Vista. On the whole, it is not especially whelming, though I do think that the degree of disdain it has received has been wholly unfair. I have two vista computers (clean installs) and neither has ever crashed. Whereas my iPhone crashes about once a week.

The main benefit is that it incorporates indexing into its directory system, so that searching files is fast. This has allowed me to adopt the google philosophy of "search, don't sort" which has saved me tons of time. Of course google desktop allowed you to do that in Windows XP, but this is just neater. After years of developing careful file saving habits (starting with our first DOS based x286 back when I was 10 or so), it is still nice to not have to worry so much any more. (I still am nostalgic sometimes for the abbreviations I developed back when file names were limited to 8 letters)

The other neat thing I discovered recently is that they now seem to incorporate some kind of "smart sorting" algorithm when you alphabetize a directory's contents. If you look at the picture, the files are sorted as:

lecture1.doc
lecture2.doc
lecture3.doc
lecture4.doc
lecture5.doc
lecture6.doc
lecture7.doc
lecture8.doc
lecture9.doc
lecture10.doc

While this is not strictly alphabetical (lecture10 should come after lecture1 and before lecture2) it is far more useful.

I used to be more diligent in naming things lecture01 and lecture02 to avoid this problem.

I used to worry when software tries to be "smart" and try to do things for me, because when software is smart, it makes it harder for me to be smart, and forces me to be lazy and stupid and just accept what it is doing for me. In this case, when I ask it to alphabetize, it doesn't really alphabetize, but instead tries to guess what I intend. But in this subtle way, I am quite pleased.

Google, too. I used to appreciate the elegance of google's original pagerank where sites were ranked based on how many other sites linked to it. It wasn't the perfect algorithm, but if you understood how it ranked pages, you could know its weaknesses, and could think for yourself how to be smart enough to circumvent them. Since it came out, google's search has adopted lots of proprietary algorithms that it hides from me, but on the whole, that's ok, because it works, so I don't mind being lazy.

Apple, though, goes too far in being "smart." It frustrates me that it thinks features like copy and paste and customization of just about anything on the iphone would be too confusing for me, and so it just decides what it think is best for me, instead of giving me a choice.

I guess it depends on personal preference. Hopefully there will always be room in the market for both.

Stephenson's Anathem uses pulp fiction to explain free will

As I get 2/3 into Neal Stephenson's Anathem, I realize the central question it addresses (in a pulp fiction writing style) is consciousness and free will.

And I was reminded of a conversation I had back in college debating whether free will exists, and I was finding it hard to believe that a smart guy like the guy I was debating would disagree with my view that free will can't exist.

We had taken as a given not to consider quantum effects since they're crazy and mess up all intuition. Then in a classical world it seems obvious to me that free will is an illusion, since if there is a state vector that represents the universe, then the laws of physics will always determine definitively the next state for all eternity. Our choices are all predetermined by the state of the particles that make up our brain and its environment.

So the idea that free will is an illusion is disturbing and at the end of the night (literally as the sun was coming up) we had agreed that free will may be an illusion, but people (and any artificial intelligence we designed) must be designed to act as if free will is real.

I felt vindicated years later, listening to my Teaching Company course on philosophy where this Berkeley Prof basically said the current consensus view in philosophy is that free will is indeed an illusion because a brain is a physical system.

Years later, I partially resolved this problem by saying that maybe the future is pre-ordained, but complex (in the formal definition), in that not solvable in less than exponential time, and that it is probably provable that no machine could compute the future faster than the future could actually arrive.

Of course, underlying all this is this nagging idea that this argument depends on classical mechanics, and with quantum mechanics, these arguments fall apart.

So what Stephenson does (and I wonder if this is his own thinking, or he stole this) is reconciles these two ideas (quantum mechanics and complexity) in order to bring consciousness and free will back. Essentially, if i can summarize his 1000 page argument succinctly, is that indeed the future in unknowable because predicting the future is hard, he asserts it is essentially NP-hard. But we know that quantum computers can solve NP problems in polynomial time. And thus our brains are actually quantum computers, and we know this because since we can indeed predict the future. Moreover, given that the future is indeterminate until the quantum states collapse, our consciousness can even influence which states quantum distributions around us collapse to, altering our environment. In fact, this is the definition of consciousness and free will, because otherwise, you have to accept that free will is an illusion.

Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced, but fantastically neat ideas.

But it is especially cool because it is relatively easy reading as it is written in the style of Jurassic Park or Ender's Game or Harry Potter but develops ridiculously sophisticated ideas. So he'll stop the action for chapter long Socratic dialogues, but they're so compellingly written, like a duel, complete with formal rules like the wizard wand duels in Harry Potter, but battling all with ideas.

I programmed today and it was glorious: Musings on a road not taken

I had some data work on my medical malpractice project that needed to be done today. I probably should have delegated the work. The guy from our statistics office even offered to do this. But I have learned that delegation often takes more work than doing it yourself, due to transaction costs (moral hazard, sticky information, delays). It was about 2 hours of repetitive manual data manipulation and I decided to write a perl program to do it myself: it was glorious.

I haven’t written any code in years. I had forgotten how satisfying it was. It made me consider the road not traveled. I could have been a programmer. I really love it. And I used to be damn good. Which sounds awful to say, but there’s that 10,000 hour theory, that it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at something. And my mom started me programming when I was 5. So sure, it was mostly print statements and for loops and copying programs out of the back of Boy’s Life magazine for years, but by 9th grade I was taking college level classes, and by college, I was getting commendations and breezing through graduate classes almost as an afterthought. I had gotten three calls from google over the years for interviews each of which I turned down.

In the end, writing the program took two and a half hours, but I have no regrets. It was far more fun than repetitive data manipulation and I am left with more capital that can be used in the future (a working computer program and programming human capital). And even if I had gone the programmer route, it probably wouldn’t have lasted. It seems like most programmers spend much of their career resisting the pull into management, a battle that inevitably they lose. So no regrets. But just fun to ponder.

(I also wonder if I would start my kids on programming at age 5. In some ways, the ability almost seems antiquated like buggy whip making. Though so is geometry and we still teach that.)

Our insignificance in the Cosmos

The New York Times reported a student at Dartmouth asking: How do you keep from despairing at the immensity of space and the smallness of us?

I remember having the exact same question back in high school, learning about cosmology, the age and shape and size of the universe, thinking about space-time (roughly 15 billion light years wide in at least 4 dimensions) and how insignificant any one life is (whose theoretical limit of one light-lifespan). And indeed I did despair for a time.

My answer at the time was that while one human is mortal, humanity is potentially immortal, and information and knowledge, would outlive even the life of the last man. As was the theme of the Shakespearean sonnets I had to memorize back freshman year. "So long as men can breathe, and eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

So my answer to the vastness of space back in high school, was to become part of the cloud of knowledge achieved by humanity.

Haven't thought about that in a while. I used to think about it more. Even used it on my first date with R-. Not sure if that helped or hurt.

Digging Vista

The New York Times has an article on living with vista. Having used vista as a clean install on two new machines, I've had no problems. Yeah, upgrading an old machine sonds problematic, but I've been happy. For the most part, no substantive differences except one: integrated search.

Now, the file explorer has fast integrated search (something you could do with google desktop, but integrated), and that's nice. Let's me adopt the google philosophy "search don't sort." After decades of experience in carefully organizing my files into directories, I don't have to so much anymore. And that is a good thing.

Recording Memories Using Implated Electrodes

Nifty article in the New York Times on new research recording human memories using electrodes.

I remember my friend working on this project back as an undergrad in 1999, when they recorded the memories of rats as they ran mazes, and showed that rats dream about running mazes. I guess it took 10 years for them to replicate for humans. But I remember being blown away by the idea that you could "see" memories. Back then, a bunch of us were excited about the prospect of recording memories (a la the movie Strange Days), and that neuroscience would be the biggest thing in the 21st century, and the youthful hubris that we could help made it happen.

One of the neatest graphs I've seen in a while

I think principal component analysis is one of the cooler applications of linear algebra (which I learned to analyze corporate bonds), but this is the coolest graph of principal components that I have ever seen. By simply using a matrix manipulation of a dataset based on the genomes of European citizens, you get a representation of the European genetic data based only on genetic data that looks remarkably like the geographical map.

See NYTimes article for more info.

Cool.

The Bush Administration's (non)War on Science

A colleague of mine recently asked my thoughts on the recent reports that the administration is suppressing EPA science. Here was my response:

On the suppression of the EPA report, I don't know the details of the current case, but from my experience, regardless of how it looked from the outside, it was never some anti-science conspiracy, but usually a case where economic and political realities of what most people would say is the common good, trump scientific considerations. Most of the CEA are academics, and hence all Democrats, and yet, I don't think any of us ever felt we were asked to do anything we felt was unethical or goes against economic principles.

So one example I do know of, was when we were trying to suppress an EPA finding that CO2 is a pollutant. Various scientists wanted to, but if we were to accept that, the Clean Air Act, says that emissions of all pollutants that might harm humans have to be reduced AT ANY COST. It would be illegal to take cost into account. Conceivably, lawyers could use such a finding to make driving illegal. Heck, breathing produces CO2, and lawyers could then sue to prevent you from breathing too heavily.

Another example was when the EPA wanted to increase regulations on particulate matter. Again, the regulation failed every conceivable cost benefit analysis, but according to the Clean Air Act, costs couldn't be taken into account. Even the statistics the EPA did to show that the regulations would have any benefit whatsoever (in this case, for asthma reduction), would not have been allowed past any referee in a decent economics journal. They used correlations, and had no instrument for causation. They used data sets with maybe 100 observations, and arbitrarily tossed out outliers.

Again, maybe it was the best science that was available, but it didn't seem like it justified a regulation that would have billions of dollars in actual costs.

So the reporting on this, was probably along the lines of "anti-science bush administration blocks regulation favored by EPA scientists. Curries to big business over the poor asthma sufferers"

But things aren't so clean cut from the inside.

So I'm probably biased on this. But I don't think excessively so.