Very amusing quote from the New York Times today:
"The situation is like that movie trailer where a guy with a deep, scary voice says, ‘In a world where credit markets are frozen, where banks refuse to lend to each other at any price, only one man, with one plan can save us.’"JARED BERNSTEIN, of the Economic Policy Institute, on the push for a financial bailout.Do you think I've chosen the wrong time to move back to the US? Hmm...
For those of you that haven't heard. There's Critical Mass tonight! No matter what city you find yourself (see picture for Budapest), as long as you have a bike handy, there will be people cyling round at some point in the evening.
Here in Manchester, the ride is supposed to start at 6pm from the Central library front door in St Peter's Square. It should be fairly good fun and I'd imagine there'll be a fair turnout of freshers. Come along too!
If you want to know more, check out posts here, here and here and the links at the bottom of each of them.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes coined his most famous phrase
Cogito, ergo sum.(or 'I think therefore I am'). I was wandering through a bookshop the other day and noticed a book called The Last Word by Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher based at NYU.
It seems (from the introduction - I'm not so good at the ol' reading lark yet...) that the idea of this book is essentially an apology for rationalism, the belief that human knowledge can be derived by careful consideration from an armchair. I could well be misinterpreting this, but as far as I can tell, Nagel thinks that subjectivism (that truth and knowledge are subjective notions which may vary from person to person) is a very pernicious influence in society.
The implications are widespread. Take for example issues presented by cosmopolitanism of modern societies. Cultures vary from country to country and although it can be said that many moral issues are agreed upon universally, there are clearly some divergences. In a democratic multicultural society with disparate moral codes, how should one resolve disputes? My own position is one of bewilderment. It seems that taking the subjectivist view and saying, 'Well, what is morally right for one side may not be the same as what is morally right for the other...', leads only to shoulder shrugging and a lack of resolution. In my mind therefore that although subjectivism is a convenient position to take logically, it is more than toothless when applied to real life. On the other hand, taking a more authoritarian and moral absolutist view is not satisfactory either - presenting people with moral rules - 'Drinking soda is wrong!' - which are to be agreed on universally is impractical.
Nagel's book then claims to have some ideas about how to justify rationalism and therefore be able to conjure absolute certainty, indubitable truth, from thin air (or at least our minds). So far, he has talked about Descartes cogito with much affection. The cogito is supposed to be a demonstration of our existence. As soon as one tries to doubt one's existence, one affirms it by thinking. Indeed, Descartes asks proposes 'So who am I? A thinking thing.' There are various objections to this, indeed some say that Descartes has rather a circular argument, presupposing the existence of this 'I' and endowing it with personal attributes which cannot be justified on purely logical grounds. Nagel's view is that there is some worth to the cogito, and I agree. Nagel gives this nice example:
After all, if someone responded to every challenge to tea-leaf reading as a method of deciding factual or practical questions by appealing to further consultation of the tea leaves, it would be thought absurd. Why is reasoning about challenges to reason different? The answer is that the appeal to reason is implicitly authorized by the challenge itself, so this is really a way of showing that the challenge is unintelligible. The charge of begging the question imples that there is an alternative - namely, to examine the reasons for and against the claim being challenged while suspending judgement about it. For the case of reasoning itself, however, no such alternative is available, since any considerations agains the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reasons against it, and these must be rationally asessed. ... In contrast, a challenge to the authority of tea leaves does not itself lead us back to the tea leaves.
This argument makes a lot of sense. It somehow tells us that we cannot doubt our own reasoning since this would involve something self-referential. Nagel goes on to say that reason is something which we just have to take on trust as being sound. That is not to say that one may not make mistakes reasoning, simply that these could be pointed out and corrected. I think he plans to argue from a sort of foundationalist standpoint having established the indubitability of reasoning.
There is some part of me that feels slightly uneasy about this though. It seems that the 'reason' Nagel is talking about is the 'synthetic analytic' that Kant proposed in the Critique of Pure Reason. Reason, in my view, is part of the apparatus of perception. Thinking long and hard may lead to greater understanding of the apparatus itself, but there is still a fundamental disconnect between what we can derive from sheer brute force logical computation in our heads and the real world outside. Nagel refers to this and claims that his reason is something quite different, but I'm not so sure.
Check out the Google books preview of The Last Word (and tell me what it's all about). Please also feel free to rant in the comments about how badly I've interpreted all of this.
That's right. Not Dvořák. Dvorak. If, like me, you grew up a philistine, you'll probably share with me the experience of discovering that there was a Czech composer called Antonín Dvořák having already seen the option in Windows 3.1 to switch to a Dvorak keyboard layout. Curious, thought I, that he was named after a keyboard layout that I assumed was named, like qwerty, by taking at random a line on the keyboard and heading right.
I turns out that the keyboard layout was named after a distant relative, one August Dvorak, a professor of education and an educational psychologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. The original qwerty keyboard layout was designed in the 1860s having been decided upon by the maker of the first commercially sucessful typewriter. The layout was designed to try, as far as possible, to eliminate typewriter jams rather than for ergonomic purposes. To do this, the keyboard layout tries as far as possible to alternate between the left and right hand, although typing this sentence, I wonder how successfull it was.
The advent of the electric typewriter in the 1930s completely eliminated the need for a layout that eliminated jamming. Moreover, the increased speeds that were now possible started to reveal the inefficiency of the QWERTY layout as typists became fatigued faster. To the rescue August Dvorak who, through careful analysis of letter frequencies in the English language and the application of various a priori principles designed the right-handed Dvorak layout. Apparently of prime importance were
- Letters should be typed by alternating between hands.
- For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and digraphs should be the easiest to type. This means that they should be on the home row, which is where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers.
- The least common letters should be on the bottom row, which is the hardest row to reach.
- The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed.
- Digraphs should not be typed with adjacent fingers.
- Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa. This motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.
As far as I know, Dvorak keyboards hold the speed record at the moment (which I think is Barabara Blackburn 212wpm). It seems rather hard to actually find references to this though.
Now that GPS has been around for a little while and the devices and chips come down in price, various games have sprung up around the technology. More well-known are things like GeoCashing (a GPS-based treasure hunt) and many more... I came across a concept called Geohashing today while trawling the internet. The original idea of geohash.org was to provide, given a location, a short URL which uniquely specified that location. It seems that the algorithm was inteded for use in forums etc.
Geohashing spawned an xkcd comic which gives an algorithm for generating a random location near you each day in terms of latitude and longitude. Here's the algorithm, as seen on xkcd:
Having read this, apparently, people started to travel to the location given by the algorithm, quickly realising that there were other xkcd readers there too.
Check out the wiki for more details. Or alternatively go here to have Google maps show you where the geohashing algorithm will take you today!
Are you au fait with finite simple groups? Well I know I'm certainly not.
For the uninitiated, a group is a mathematical object which can be thought of as the collection of symmetries of some object. As for simple groups, I guess they can sort of be thought of as the basic buidling blocks of groups (whatever that means...)
There's a classification of finite simple groups which is one of the great results of the 20th/21st century. It shows that there are four categories (not in the mathematical sense) into which the finite simple groups may be divided, the most romantic of these consisting of the 26 sporadic groups. I say romantic, what I really mean is quirkily named - one of the groups contained therin is the Monster group while another is called the Baby Monster... Ah those finite group theorists.
Anyway, as someone who finds finite simple groups particularly scary, I was rather pleased to see a rather interesting page at Scientific American. There you can find a couple of games that give some idea of the structure of the groups M12, M24 and the Conway group without actually knowing any mathematics whatsoever. Click on the link below to investigate. Happy playing!
Incidentally, if you're feeling slightly fobbed off by my lack of a definition of a finite simple group, then check out the articles on group, normal subgroup, quotient group and simple group.
Remember the 80s? Don't answer that. Those ten years made up the best possible tribute to that most hallowed of musical forms - the Power Ballad. I was listening to Bonnie Tyler's Total eclipse of the heart today and thought it sounded rather like Meatloaf. Indeed, it sounded like a lot of songs I remember from the 80s. I discovered that in fact there was a much more tangible link between all of these; the man, the legend - Jim Steinman. He wrote and produced all of these songs and many more including:
This time I decided to go classical on your asses.
You are listening to:
(taken from the book 'A True and Impartial Look at North Korea', published by the Kim Jong-il Foundation for Truth, Freedom, and Countering the Malicious Lies of the American Imperialist Aggressors; Pyongyang)
I thought I'd write a quick little ditty about a bit of music with which I have been strangely obsessed ever since we sang it in the Burlington Choir a couple of months ago. It's a piece by Thoinot Arbeau (1519-1595), real name Jehan Tabourot originally written as an instrumental dance. Apparently Arbeau was a master of dances and wrote the definitintive book on Renaissance dance, the Orchésographie from which much of modern knowledge about the period is derived. The pavane Belle qui tiens ma vie is I think one of the very few pieces in the Orchésographie with all four parts filled in by Arbeau himself, the others having only the top line. Here's a facsimile of the relevant pages and here's a modern version.
I read and listened today to David King, Chief Scientific advisor to the British government from 2000-2007 saying that there is no space in scientific funding for so called 'blue skies research'.
Blue skies research is essentially research for curiosity's sake, trying to gain greater understanding of some part of the nature of reality. As such, it generally has no immediate applications at its conception, although it is responsible for the theories that lie as the bedrock supporting applied science, engineering and economics.
One example of blue skies research is into discovering the very nature of physical interaction in the universe, be it on the grand scale of cosmology or the minute scale of particle physics. The Large Hadron Collider which was switched on yesterday at CERN is a good example of the blue sky. David King bemoaned the spending of 500m pounds on the LHC, saying
"It's all very well to demonstrate that we can land a craft on Mars, it's all very well to discover whether or not there is a Higgs boson (a potential mass mechanism); but I would just suggest that we need to pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial."
Coming from a leading scientist, this comes across as patently ridiculous and rather confusing. Ok, so I might be a little biased being a pure mathematician (how much more blue sky can you get?) and feeling as if we're getting very little funding already. This application driven point of view seems ridiculously closed minded and incredibly short sighted. Particle physics has so far produced such (presumably useless according to DK) devices as the transistor, the computer display, radiotherapy, x-rays... In fact, most of the major advances that characterise the 20th century are due in no small part to spin-offs of particle physics experiments.
Science in the UK seems hopelessly doomed when Chief scientific advisers can be so incredibly anti-science. Given this, it was incredibly gratifying to see David King (above right) berated by Brian Cox (above left), the poster boy of UK particle physics (and a Professor in the High Energy Physics department at Manchester) on Newsnight last night. He put forward the remark that on the one day in which fundamental scientific research is actually covered in the media, it was ridiculous for the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to be pouring cold water on the achievement.
If you're reading this Prof King (haha!), I suggest that you quit your job as chief scientific advisor to UBS and spend all of your time tackling climate change before suggesting that blue sky researchers should change their focus and jeopardise modern science in the process.
Check out:
This pretty shocking video is of Patrick Pogan, a 3rd generation member of the NYPD shoving a NYC critical masser into the pavement. I thought this was pretty bad and started reading into the story. The crazy thing is, not only was the cyclist, Christopher Long, unceremoniously heaved over, he was also charged for assault!
Instant thoughts of left wing hippie internet propaganda immediately popped into my head, but these were pretty quickly quelled by this, a copy of Pogan's statement. Very quickly, this video, which was kindly provided by a tourist was uploaded onto YouTube, getting a million and a half hits within a couple of months and completely rubbishing the assault charge, which was promptly dropped.
It goes to show kids: either join the police or carry a camera.
Today Thailand's prime miniester was forced out of office by the judiciary on rather unusual grounds. Put more eloquently, by The Times:
Thailand’s Prime Minister was forced to resign today over his double life as a television celebrity chef.
After a mammoth deliberation session by the nine judges of Thailand’s Constitutional Court, Samak Sundaravej was told today that he and his Cabinet must resign, plunging his country's crisis-stricken politics still deeper into chaos.
The judgment brings to an end the rule of the first democratically elected prime minister since Thailand’s government fell to a military coup in 2006.
This is the culmination of riots and various other civil disobedience over a long period. Apparently (according to WNYC), the judiciary is usually extremely slow when it comes to processing cases etc and so this looks very much to be a stitch up. Having said that, the thousands of supporters camped in his office - which is presumably huge - seem to be celebrating. The Guardian today published what everyone is dying to see, some of his recipes. For your delectation, here's one reproduced:
Pigs' legs in Coca-Cola
Ingredients (serves five):
- Five pig legs
- Four bottles of Coca-Cola
- Three tablespoons salt
- Fish sauce
- Garlic, chopped
- See-uan (a sweet, dark sauce)
- Four to five cinnamon sticks
- Coriander root
- Ground pepper
- Five tablespoons "pongpalo" powder
- Shitake mushrooms
Method: Place the pig legs in a large pot. Pour over the Coca-Cola and bring to the boil. Add the coriander root, garlic, pepper, salt, fish sauce, "pongpalo" and cinnamon sticks. Add sufficient water to cover. Cut the stalks off the Shitake mushrooms and add hot water to soften. Then add to the main pot. Bring to boil and simmer or at least three hours. Make sweet sauce with see-uan. Serve chilli and vinegar sauce.
So... I'm sure you've all heard about CERN's new black hole machine (technical term) that could potentially end the world on Wednesday. Actually it's a Large Hadron Collider to you ley people.
One camp thinks we'll be fine, and even if they do make a black hole, it will be a baby one that won't hurt us. The other camp thinks the world will get eaten up and we'll all disappear. On Wednesday.
Makes me think of all the other prophecies and ideas that have predicted our doom- the Mayan Calendar, Nostradamus, even Mother Shipton (of Yorkshire fame).
I don't really feel worried. Maybe it's because I'm stressed about moving, and if the world ends, I can't do anything about it, AND I won't have to pack anymore- that's not all that bad.
Also, I know someone who just worked at CERN last week (shout out to Andrew, husband of Molly) so this makes me a lot less worried. Seems more like a 9-5 job then doomsday device.
Speaking of Doomsday, I watched it on Saturday (I'm a big Neil Marshall fan- The Descent was brilliant, and I'd be happy to tell you why). Some people (my husband) think its too mental but I really enjoyed it, and not just because I have a thing for women who kick ass. Thanks to a virus, Scotland is walled off again (a la Hadrian's Wall- how brilliant is that) and left to die. The virus resurfaces in London, about 25 years later, so they decide to go back into Scotland and find a cure in the survivors. The survivors are split between a tribal Mad Max culture (based in Glasgow, and strikingly similar to today's residents) and a 'civilised' medieval kingdom, taken up residence in an old castle, using the armour, ways of life, etc.
I think both completely plausible. I defy you to find a museum curator who doesn't secretly fantasize about using their museum collections to revert to a historic way of life. When the floods happened in Yorkshire last year one museum hauled out an antique fire truck to help pump the water.
So, in preparation for our impending doom, why not watch it on Wednesday?
Ok, I've heard of concept cars but have you ever heard of a concept bike? Well here are some pictures of one. And yes, it was inspired by old motorbike designs, although apparently the handlebar design comes from 1930s track bicycles.
This one was designed by Eric Therner and claims, I think a little erroneously to create a new market...
One thing that I definitely do like about it is that there are integrated LED lights inside the frame itself. Was this never practical before? Anyway, drool all you like.
Check out these links:
I've just read the horrific story of Stephen Wills, a Manchester cyclist who was killed by a hit an run driver in April this year. I have some vague remembrances of seeing an e-mail on the Critical Mass mailing list about this at the time but hadn't quite realised what had happened.
Stephen Wills (see picture) was cycling along Princess Street when he was knocked off his bike by a silver Volkswagen Golf which had just been stolen. The drivers of the car left him in the street which, to be brutally honest, I didn't find particularly surprising.
What I did find surprising was that no-one stopped to help him. Motorists decided that they would instead try and drive around him as he lay in the middle of the road. It was only when a passing pedestrian came upon the scene that an ambulance was called. Unfortunately, it was too late and Stephen died on the way to A&E. As if this wasn't bad enough, it emerged in the autopsy that although he had died of severe head wounds, both his legs had also been broken, suggesting he had been run over by a passing car after having been knocked over.
This tragedy sparked a spate of articles in the tabloid press rightly decrying the callousness of drivers and of 'modern society'. Among them however was this monstrosity from the Telegraph which (please correct me if I've somehow misinterpreted this) seems to try to justify drivers' reactions from a personal safety viewpoint.
It's too dangerous now for Good Samaritans
By Harry Mount
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 18/04/2008I wonder if the original Good Samaritan would have stopped to help the poor bicyclist who was killed by joyriders in Moss Side at the weekend.
Several drivers swerved round the dying Stephen Wills and one ran him over, breaking his legs, before somebody called an ambulance.
Manchester police were critical about the fact that no one stopped to help, but I'm not sure I would have stopped either.
Things have changed a bit since the Good Samaritan's day. Crime figures for 20 AD are hard to get hold of but the road from Jerusalem to Jericho doesn't sound nearly as dangerous as Princess Road, the dual carriageway in Moss Side where poor Mr Wills was killed.
According to St Luke, the victim had a rough time of it - he was stripped, beaten and robbed. But the Gospel also says that the robbers quickly cleared off.
The priest and the Levite who passed by before the Samaritan turned up were just too lazy or selfish to help out; there was no suggestion that they were under any threat of attack themselves.
Nowadays any Good Samaritan who helps a crime victim is in danger of becoming one himself, particularly in a place as violent as Moss Side.
Recently, from my sitting room window in north London, I saw a boy of about seven walk down the street, holding an aerosol can at waist height and spraying a thick white line on a wall as he ambled along.
I didn't move; nor did any of my neighbours. We'd all come to the same cowardly but logical conclusion - better to have an ugly white line across the wall opposite our houses than an ugly knife wound across our stomachs.
We'd have had to be not only Good Samaritans to intervene, but also Optimistic, Unworldly and Extremely Rash Samaritans, too.
Apologies for this rant, but it is a natural consequence of the pit-of-my-stomach disgust inspired by the utterly ridiculous whimsy ('Crime figures for 20 AD are hard to get hold of...' ) with which Mount seems to approach what was a tragic circumstance. I can only bring my own prejudices to bear when I suppose that he doesn't cycle himself and so couldn't possibly realise that for those of us who choose or are forced by financial circumstance to cycle that being knocked over is a perpetual stress. Alas, death is not corrected as easily as scratched bodywork or a diminished no-claims bonus.
It also reminds me of mast week's Manchester Critical Mass. Cycling through Chorlton, a white van man decided on rashness over patience and drove into the oncoming lane to overtake the mass on a busy single lane road. An oncoming taxi swerved towards the pavement to avoid a collision, narrowly missing a pedestrian and crashing into a parked car with considerable force.
In his considerable haste and imperceptible wisdom, the white van man subsequently decided to drive off as fast as possible. Summoning the vigilante within, somehow, the seething mass of bicycling humanity seemed to telepathically decide in unison that something must be done and promptly caught up with the van, surrounding it and causing a traffic jam. Though berated at the time as public nuisances by passers by and other motorists, taking down his numberplate and threatening to call the police seemed to do the trick and he returned to the scene.
I must admit, it felt incredibly empowering to actually be the cause some tangible difference. This was clearly only made possible by the sheer number of cyclists taking part and some sort of mutual understanding or compassion in the sense of Kundera's 'co-feeling'
To have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion-joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy.
(from 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', Milan Kundera)
Perhaps this is the power of grass-roots movements such as Critical Mass. Ostensibly, the event is not 'organised' in any formal sense. There is no ideology, no creed and indeed no rules. Incidents such as this highlight the possibility of people linked rather superficially, here by an activity, nevertheless pulling together to some real effect. It is the closed-minded denial of this possibility more than anything else that really enrages me about ill-conceived articles such as Mount's which serve only to antagonise the public.
These pockets of co-feeling are to be found in what I understand as 'sub-cultures'. It seems to me that groups of people who to some extent identify with each other on some grounds be it political viewpoint or musical taste have some notion of solidarity and co-feeling.
A good example of this is the bicycle messenger subculture which seems to revel in motorists' revulsion and is driven by its non-conformity. Particularly indicative of this is the Ghost Bike movement. When cyclists or pedestrians are killed in traffic accidents, people erect a ghost bike at the point at which the accident took place as a tribute. Check out this video of the tribute ride to all those who died on the streets of NYC.
A ghost bike was made for Stephen Wills and a memorial ride was organised.
Check out some links:
One of my friends sent me this great article from the Washington Post. It turns out, Joshua Bell, virtuoso violinist by day, asleep by night, decided to busk one morning in a DC rush-hour to see what would happen. Check it out.
And here's the article from which this post came. Oh, and here's the article in Terrence Tao's blog which pointed Steve at the WP article. Oh and here's another similar experiment with abstract art instead of a violin. Well I guess I might as well embed the video (complete with plinky plonky piano music so that you know it's deep). See if you can spot the subterreanian moral gravitas.
So it turns out that it's unknown whether pi + e is irrational. Crazy eh?
For those not in the mathematical loop, pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.
e is a little trickier to explain. Perhaps the easiest way of learning about e is to look at the Wikipedia page, which gives some explanation and a great number of equivalent definitions.
A number is said to be rational if it can be written as fraction of two whole numbers. For instance 12 = 12/1, -1.5 = (-3)/2 etc... It turns out that neither pi nor e can't be written as a fraction, but it's certainly not obvious (indeed unknown) whether their sum can or can't.
Proofs on a postcard to...
Just heard Zoe Keating on the always excellent Radio Lab.
It's like a one man band, but with a cello and a computer. She plays a couple nice tunes in this piece.
Of course, radiolab isn't usually about funky cellists. It's usually about blowing you mind.
