Wheels within Wheels

About a month ago, I ran across this web post. Yesterday, I ran across this article, which is excerpted from a new book I’m going to have to read. Fascinating stuff.

My personal take on Sapir-Whorf is that language doesn’t provide an absolute limit to what you can think about. Instead, it limits what you can think about easily. If the first were true, then how would any new concept make it into language in the first place?

An interesting personal sidelight is that I remember having an absolute internal compass until about the age of 11. That was about the time my family left England - I wonder if I’d internalized the subliminal clues where I lived, and coming back to the US changed the clues enough to disrupt my compass for good?

The more they stay the same.

I’m currently clean-shaven, but, when I have a beard, it’s normally the third from the left on this diagram. I would have thought it would be considered more evil than trustworthy.

I’d seen stories about how bad Detroit is (and heard the jokes, such as the one from Kentucky Fried Movie), but I hadn’t realized that it was this bad.

I don’t care much for cilantro. Although I recognize that it’s a vital component in certain salsa recipes, too much of it makes things acquire a lemony soap flavor to me. I remember at an office Christmas dinner many years ago being offered a spoonful of (read: forced to try) a cilantro soup. Yuck! Well, it seems that there is a genetic component to whether you like the flavor of cilantro. I find that easy to believe; I’ve long thought it myself. Personally, I suspect that it’s sex-linked, because most of the people I know who like cilantro are women, and most of the people I know who dislike it are men.

The iPad is a neat toy. I don’t really want one, but I could certainly have fun with one. One of the major complaints is that you can’t print from it. Well, the user community has taken care of that limitation.

Speaking of Apple products, in this case, the iPhone, this third-party app looks interesting.

This also looks like a fun toy.

Yet another reason not to get personalized license plates.

Chords and words for songs by Tom Waits.

How safe are your passwords?

I think I’ve got some ideas for unproductively sucking up more of my free time.

I’ll finish with a few videos. First, a nice version of Moondance on uke:

Next, a trailer for a movie of obvious class and tone:

Finally, a link to the Nova presentation on fractals.

Not quite the witty title I wanted, but it fits the theme.

I missed this story when it came out, but it’s newsworthy because it’s a very low-probability event: a 14-year-old boy was struck by a meteorite last year.

Next, we have a claim that space aliens may not be friendly. Is this news to anyone? Besides peace-and-love-and-crystal-harmony types, that is? It’s not like there haven’t been books and movies addressing the topic before. Given the history of war between different tribes and nations, why would anyone presume that aliens would necessarily be peaceful?

One quote from the article is worth a little discussion:

Some scientists are puzzled as to why no messages have been sent back even though humans have been transmitting radio and television signals for the last century.

That’s actually a pretty stupid thing to be puzzled about. First, that would require another intelligence within 50 light years, and further presumptions that:

• They received the broadcasts and recognized them as a product of intelligence immediately.
• They deciphered them immediately.
• They decided to send a response immediately.
• They had the equipment available immediately for sending that response.

Just coming up with some simple points for each of the above:

• When the first pulsar was detected, some thought it to be a broadcast from an extraterrestrial intelligence, because it was considered too regular to have been natural.
• How long have we been working on Linear A? Would we ever have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone?
• Let’s hope they’re not organized with bureaucracies. Perhaps they’re afraid we (or someone else) would find them and hurt them. Maybe they’re isolationists.

If they’ve got equipment to receive us, they’ve probably got equipment to send back, so that’s not necessarily a big objection. They may have reasons for not wanting to use it, or to broadcast at the necessary level to reach us. Then again, perhaps they have already responded to us, and we didn’t recognize it as a response, because it’s using a technology that they expected us to develop in the meantime.

It’s probably moot, though. A few months ago, I read an article that said that our broadcasts would sink into the background noise within some distance that I don’t remember, but was shorter than I expected. I couldn’t find a link to it to put in this post, but I did find this, which makes the same point. We do have equipment that can pull signals out of the noise, even if the noise is louder than the signals, but in that case, we know what kind of signals we’re looking for. That’s a lot different than, “There may be a signal here. It may be hidden below the level of the noise, and we have no idea what it looks like.” Searching for it in those conditions is a good recipe for ongoing employment, but not necessarily for success.

It may be moot for another reason, though. Technology marches on, and the changes and improvements have side effects. When I was younger, I used to see billboards across the southwest for radio station XERF, broadcasting from just across the border in Mexico with 250,000 watts of broadcast power. They were in Mexico because, among other reasons, it freed them from FCC restrictions on broadcast power. My understanding was that atmospheric skip meant that they could be heard across most of the US, at least at night. Recently, I’ve been hearing about low-power FM and neighborhood radio. Lower-power signals means a shorter propagation distance before it falls into the background noise.

In the early days of personal computing, back in the 1970s, I read about how some people were using AM radios to debug their programs: the switching frequencies of the digital signals in the computer fell into the AM range, so tuning between stations would let you hear a series of shifting tones that related to what the application was doing. In the days when some people only had lights and switches for I/O, that could be an important diagnostic technique. Nowadays, computers operate well above the AM range. They take less power (sometimes absolutely, sometimes merely relatively) than they used to, as well. I work in the field of embedded computing; Intel’s 80188 processor, which used to be popular for the purpose, consumed 800 milliamps if you were using the NMOS part. The MSP430 from Texas Instruments can require as little as a couple microamps. That’s not going to generate much in the way of radio signal.

So, I guess what I’m saying here is that it’s pretty unlikely that aliens shot the rock at the kid.

But is it really a process?

This looks like a big step toward some scenarios found in science fiction. It will be a while, perhaps a long while, before this is developed into a viable medical treatment, but probably less time than you may think. Fascinating things are going on in science. It’s tough to keep up anymore.

Just a couple of links. First, the hockey stick graph was discredited a few years ago. Even if you consider it valid, however, try examining it in longer-term historical context.

Second, the East Anglia CRU records showed an increasing temperature trend for Antarctica. I wonder how that happened. Comments #13 and #26 in the thread are also interesting.

Third, the East Anglia CRU has problems - data that has been online for years is no longer available on their site. They’re either doing a clumsy attempt to cover things up, or their IT department is staffed by incompetents. Or both.

Fourth, the British Met (Meteorology) Office has a long list of scientists who still believe in AGW, and don’t think the current situation detracts from its validity. Bishop Hill found it interesting to note several prominent climate scientists who aren’t signatories.

Fifth, we have one response to awkward questions about the situation - call the guards to prevent more of them being asked:

But, isn’t this what Larry Summers lost his job over?

There’s a lot of good analysis and commentary out there. Bishop Hill is a good place to start.

This guest post at JoNova makes a strong claim, but has some interesting graphs and information.

This post has a lot of good information.

This post isn’t actually about AGW, but it brings up the famous faked “hockey stick” graph in order to introduce another graph that shows a real hockey stick shape. Scary stuff, indeed.

I’ve always been suspicious of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I don’t doubt that climate is changing; it’s always changing. I’ve just been leery of trusting the predictions, particularly since reading some years ago that scientists can’t tell whether clouds are an overall positive or negative contributor.

It now appears that that mistrust was justified; the release of the emails and other files from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit demonstrate that these people have been lying for years in order to advance the agenda of the “we’re all gonna die - government’s gotta take charge now!” people.

These people aren’t doing science; there’s evidence that they’ve colluded to prevent scientists with contrary positions from being published, lamented that they had to manipulate the data because it didn’t match their positions, and conspired to thwart releasing their data and code in response to Freedom of Information requests.

Even though it’s an English university, it’s important to Americans - indeed, to everyone in the world. It’s apparently one of four “authoritative” climate research centers in the world, and is partially supported by funds from American taxpayers.

People have pointed out suspicious language (”hide the decline”) and possible criminal conspiracies in the emails, but the key files appear to be related to the computer code they used for their “models.” I put the word “models” in quotes because they don’t appear to have actually used any modeling in their projections; they merely extrapolated trend lines. Unfortunately, the trends they’re extrapolating don’t appear to be real and accurate. Not only have people found artificial “hockey-stick-shaped” corrections in the code that get applied to the data, there is a file named Harry_Read_Me.txt in the released files which contains the notes of a programmer working on the code they used to make their projections. Among his notes and comments, we find the information that he couldn’t replicate their published results, and that the data files were improperly identified, didn’t have consistent format, and had automatic and manual adjustments applied to them. When the CRU “scientists” blew off a FOIA request by saying that they’d “lost” the original data (at least one of the emails contained a threat to delete the data rather than release it), they may not have been lying.

Replication is key to science. Scientists are expected to release their data and methodology, and other scientists are expected to try to poke holes in it. The CRU people have prevented this, and along with the revelations in these files, it means that everything the CRU has released that promotes the view that AGW is real and a problem has been discredited. We can’t trust anything they’ve said. It also means that none of the actions that have been called for to deal with the “problem” of AGW should be taken - why should we take action based on information that we can neither trust nor verify?

This issue not been covered much by the major new media. Ace notes that that fits his expectations that, with respect to hacked information, the media cover the contents of the information if it works against the right, and focuses on the method of acquisition if it works against the left.

Reference links:

A personal history of dealing with CRU concerning FOI requests.

Daily Bayonet’s Weekly Roundup

A good roundup on the CRU computer code.

Charles Martin on the CRU computer programs. Don’t miss this comment, specifically, the second paragraph.

Good information on Harry_Read_Me.txt here, particularly in the comments.

More on the computer programs.

Something else about one of the CRU “scientists” here.

This is not related to the CRU scandal, but it shows how much of our efforts may be incorrectly-focused.

Thoughts from esr on transparency and trust in science.

I’ve written about AGW before, here and here. I thought I’d written about the discovery that the famous “hockey-stick” graph of global temperatures was based on cherry-picked data, but I guess I hadn’t.

Lots of miscellaneous stuff here today. I actually started the post yesterday, but my browser crashed. Good thing I’d saved a copy of the article-in-progress before that happened.

First, Everything You Need To Know About Human / Cat Relationships Summed Up In One Picture.

Need a laugh track? Perhaps something more versatile?

Guns are such horrible, evil, nasty things that in England, you can now be convicted and sent to jail for turning in a weapon someone discards on your property.

I can’t say that I listen to girl groups much (Värttinä is the only recent one that comes to mind, and given that they’ve released a 25th anniversary CD, aren’t they a “woman” group rather than a “girl” group?), but there are certainly some girls in girl groups that are really cute (perky brunette alert … yow!). It would have been an attractive dress even if someone hadn’t taken scissors to it.

Worst storm of the year in England. I thought this photo was particularly impressive:

I never realized that Charles Dickens based Ebenezer Scrooge on a real person.

You say you know a couple who’ve been together a long time? This long?

I knew there was a reason I didn’t like amusement park rides. Several years back, there was a major hailstorm in Denver (baseball-sized hail in some areas), and at least two employees at Elitch Gardens abandoned their stations, leaving people stuck on the rides. I guess the lesson here is never to get onto any ride that you can’t climb down from unassisted. Think anyone will let you practice?

Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants,
Yours are the legs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance -
Have you seen yourself retreating?
- Ogden Nash

This makes an uncomfortable amount of sense.

An explanation of computation theory for lawyers. I remember courses described as “Physics for Jocks,” but this isn’t the same sort of thing.

This sounds like a fun game, but I imagine, based on the name, that you’re supposed to play quietly.