The universe as an infinite pile of overlapping grapefruits

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Misconceptions about the Big Bang -- [ COSMOLOGY ] -- Baffled by the expansion of the universe? You're not alone. Even astronomers frequently get it wrong

I think it's simpler to believe we just live in a simulation, or, if you prefer, the dream of a God. Then we push all this bizarre stuff off to whatever runs the dreamer. Don't you agree?

Observers living in the Andromeda galaxy and beyond have their own observable universes that are different from but overlap with ours. Andromedans can see galaxies we cannot, simply by virtue of being slightly closer to them, and vice versa. Their observable universe also used to be the size of a grapefruit. Thus, we can conceive of the early universe as a pile of overlapping grapefruits that stretches infinitely in all directions. Correspondingly, the idea that the big bang was 'small' is misleading. The totality of space could be infinite. Shrink an infinite space by an arbitrary amount, and it is still infinite.

...Does this prediction of faster-than-light galaxies mean that Hubble's law is wrong? Doesn't Einstein's special theory of relativity say that nothing can have a velocity exceeding that of light? This question has confused generations of students. The solution is that special relativity applies only to "normal" velocities--motion through space. The velocity in Hubble's law is a recession velocity caused by the expansion of space, not a motion through space. It is a general relativistic effect and is not bound by the special relativistic limit. Having a recession velocity greater than the speed of light does not violate special relativity.

...Astronomers have observed about 1,000 galaxies with redshifts larger than 1.5. That is, they have observed about 1,000 objects receding from us faster than the speed of light. Equivalently, we are receding from those galaxies faster than the speed of light. The radiation of the cosmic microwave background has traveled even farther and has a redshift of about 1,000. When the hot plasma of the early universe emitted the radiation we now see, it was receding from our location at about 50 times the speed of light

...Thus, we can observe light from galaxies that have always been and will always be receding faster than the speed of light. Another way to put it is that the Hubble distance is not fixed and does not mark the edge of the observable universe.

...If space were not expanding, the most distant object we could see would now be about 14 billion light-years away from us, the distance light could have traveled in the 14 billion years since the big bang...the current distance to the most distant object we can see is about three times farther, or 46 billion light-years.

... People often assume that as space expands, everything in it expands as well. But this is not true. Expansion by itself--that is, a coasting expansion neither accelerating nor decelerating--produces no force. Photon wavelengths expand with the universe because, unlike atoms and cities, photons are not coherent objects whose size has been set by a compromise among forces. A changing rate of expansion does add a new force to the mix, but even this new force does not make objects expand or contract.

...In fact, in our universe the expansion is accelerating, and that exerts a gentle outward force on bodies. Consequently, bound objects are slightly larger than they would be in a nonaccelerating universe, because the equilibrium among forces is reached at a slightly larger size. At Earth's surface, the outward acceleration away from the planet's center equals a tiny fraction (10–30) of the normal inward gravitational acceleration. If this acceleration is constant, it does not make Earth expand; rather the planet simply settles into a static equilibrium size slightly larger than the size it would have attained.

I love how the author slips in the part about "size set by a compromise among forces". Existence as a committee deliberation. I definitely don't understand any of this.

Detective Duane does impressive work

ChoicePoint Data Cache Became a Powder Keg (washingtonpost.com)

Sheriff detective Duane Decker gets a call from ChoicePoint. He sets up a routine sting operation and uncovers a massive identity theft.

The ChoicePoint story is interesting in so many ways. The most important questions are around the primary market for personal information and the indentity theft industry but there are other neat aspects. For example, are all LA Sheriffs as clever and effective as Mr. Decker? For another, I think it's fascinating how Nigeria seems have developed a "comparative advantage" (economics term) in identity theft and in fraud.

58877241. Never forget.

Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.

Can Betty G's story be true? It would seem incredible in a work of fiction. We should know within a week or so.

Influenza is picking up late this year

CDC - Influenza (Flu) | Weekly US Map: Influenza Summary Update

As of Feb 19th Oregon and Washington are hard hit, as is much of the SouthEast. The CDC doesn't split out Northern California from southern, but I've heard anectdotal reports that suggest San Francisco may resemble Portland. Minnesota is still on the quiet side. The CDC says some of the current strains are different enough that even vaccinated persons may be susceptible. Early treatment with antivirals can significantly shorted duration of illness; this works best when a family member is known to have the flu and others start to develop very early symptoms. A script for antivirals for family members may be written when the index case is diagnosed (helps if you're seeing a family doc!).

It will be interesting to see next week's map.

Creating a reliable system out of unreliable components: Google and massive redundancy

Google's secret of success? Dealing with failure | CNET News.com

For Google, reliability is an emergent property of the system. An individual cell (computers) is not that robust. Cells die and are taken out of commission every day. The system, however, is very robust.

Sound familiar?

That's how your body works. Individual cells are not all that reliable. They are constantly mutating, breaking down, getting infected, becoming immortal (bad). The human body, however, is reasonably reliable -- we don't crash every day. Reliability is an emergent property of large numbers of unreliable components.

Google wasn't the first enterprise to product reliability through redundancy. The space shuttle flies with (I think) six computers. Five are identical, one is quite different. They all have to agree on their outputs.

What's the lesson for home? I'm not sure. I need to think about that one. System reliability (phone, pda, server, desktop, laptop, iPod ... ) is a big headache in our household. I know I need more reliable and less troublesome tools.

World Bank executives vanish from offices, mobs ransack empty buildings

The New York Times > Business > World Business > Fiorina Called Candidate for World Bank

Paul Wolfowitz is the other proposed option.

Environmentally induced ADD: Medicine in the Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Online - Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform

I don't routinely read the HBR (though I'm going to start), but a colleague brought this article to my attention. The author, Edward Hallowell, claims that there's an epidemic of environmentally induced attention-deficit disorder, which he calls "ADT" (attention deficit trait). His thesis is that our hunter-gatherer prefrontal cortex is being increasingly overloaded by distractions and environmental stressors, inducing a failure of "executive" function and a set of behaviors resembing adult ADD. The difference between ADT and ADD is that when the environment changes, the ADT behaviors resolve. Hallowell has written a number of books on ADD/ADHD, and from an Amazon comment I gather he has ADD (not ADT) himself. So while he's not a researcher, he does have some street cred on the topic.

From my own experience in corporate America I'd say the premise has loads of "face validitity". Since this article was written for the HBR he focuses on senior executives with "ADT", but the thesis is just as true for a parent overloaded by the care of a child with a disease or cognitive/behavioral disorder.

Hallowell's recommendations are pretty reasonable. He doesn't favor buying a CrackBerry (BlackBerry). He favors regular personal connection and interaction with trusted colleagues (something that's becoming infrequent in many companies), sleep, exercise, healthy diet, limiting email times, avoiding carbohydrate loading, and a few basic techniques:

1. Keep a section of one's desk clear at all times.
2. Break down large tasks into small ones.
3. Keep a portion of the day protected for thinking.
4. Contain email to specific hours. (I've taken to disabling everything that might notify me of inbox activity)
5. At the end of each day identify no more than five critical priorities for the next day.
6. Begin each day by tackling at least one of the critical priorities -- before attending to email and messages.
7. Follow the GTD methodology for articles and messages (He doesn't put it this way, but that's what he's talking about.)
8. Schedule important work for the times of day you know you're most productive. (Unfortunately for me, one of my more productive intervals is between 4:30pm and 6:00pm. Weird!)
9. Find ways to doodle, fidget, pace, or listen to music -- whatever it takes to settle down.
10. Have a friendly face-to-face chat with someone you like every 4-6 hours.
11. When the frontal lobes are in panic mode -- try these techniques to settle them down
    - do an easy rote task: reset watch, read a dictionary (wow!), do a crossword puzzle
    - move around, take the stairs down and up
    - brainstorm, talk with a colleague

Sometimes Hallowell seems to be talking about persons with true ADD rather than ADT, but I suspect those distinctions are artificial. Hallowell would probably say "Some people have ADD all the time, but there are some environments that will induce ADD in almost anyone".

You can read the article at your library or pay $7 to download a PDF. It will be interesting to see if this idea holds up over time and even gets some serious data behind it. I don't get the feeling that the world is getting less complex, or that email, the BlackBerry, instant messaging, mobile phones, voice mail(s) and ceaseless travel are going to go away.

Environmentally induced ADD is here to stay. Does anyone remember "Future Shock"? Nowadays the world of 1984, which Alvin Toffler described as so unstettling and distressing, seems quaint and tranquil. I can hardly wait for 2025 -- which is when I'm "supposed" to retire. Sooner or later, 99% of us may be on meds all the time just to cope with our ever more crazed world. (BTW, this last idea was nicely explored in at least one recent "high end" science fiction novel about 5 -8 years ago.)

Spam of the month: FBI needs answers!

This spam/worm made me laugh. The punctuation and spelling was amateurish, but I thought the social engineering trick (cause recipient to activate the 32.Sober.K@mm worm) was clever.

Return-Path:
Received: from hllqc.gov ([198.70.16.205])
From: Officer@fbi.gov
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 21:56:38 GMT
Subject: You visit illegal websites

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 40 illegal Websites.

Important: Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
M. John Stellford

Federal Bureau of Investigation -FBI-
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Room 2130
Washington, DC 20535
(202) 324-3000

The link on the phone number is mine, the address and number is the FBI's.

Podcasting: iPodder.org

iPodder.org

Podcasting is about recording audio in MP3 and posting it on the web. Software detects the recording and adds it to a syndication database. Other software helps you find and download the MP3. Then you play it.

I was trying to figure out how I could use this. I have a lot of CME to listen to, not to mention music. The only thing I could think of were children's stories. If someone were very good at reading kids stories I'd love to have the audio for car trips and doctors visits.

There are, as my friend Lin would point out, some significant intellectual property issues with that scenario.

Death of the PDA, take III

PalmInfocenter.com: Study Predicts Steep Decline for PDA Market

The PDA has come and gone a few times, most famously with the Newton. Now the Palm and PocketPC devices again appear to be going away:

... the traditional PDA is heading for significant declines in sales, and in fact is nearing the end of its life as a major product segment, according to In-Stat. Shipments reached only 8.7 million units in 2004, down from 10 million in 2003, the high-tech market research firm says.

The outlook for upcoming years is not good, as the PDA market will have a negative Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of -21.5% during the 2004-2009 period. By 2009, it is expected that this segment will be composed of devices designed for specific vertical markets and low-end products. The market decline will occur as users switch to other products, such as smartphones and portable media players, a natural evolution of the category...

The market has been dying for years, but I don't agree that "smartphones" and "portable media players" are a natural extension of the market.

The original Palm vision was a personal organizer that was also an open, lightweight, low capacity, application platform. It's strength was synchronization and desktop integration and utter, astounding, reliability. It was inexpensive (a tenth the cost of a laptop, vs today's devices that are can be 60% of the price of a very nice iBook.) and semi-disposable with a strong desktop support.

There's nothing comparable today. Nothing.

Why not? That's the interesting question. I think there was once a limited but decent market for this kind of device. That market was fragmented and obliterated:

1. It seems odd now, but for a time Microsoft felt threatened by the Palm. They responded with a huge effort that produced a lot of very defective products that fell short of vast technical ambitions. Users of these products will never touch a PDA again -- having a personal organizer fail is a traumatic experience. The PocketPC is probably as robust as the unreliable Palm PDAs left, but the market to support it is quite small.
   
   
2. Microsoft Exchange took over the corporate world. Microsoft had no incentive to support Palm synching with Exchange server. Very few PalmOS users survived the experience of synching a PalmOS device with an Exchange server. PocketPC users didn't do much better at first; ActiveSync was a disaster for years. Then the CrackBerry came in and wiped out the residual corporate PDA users. Again, market attrition.
   
   
3. Pocket competition. Even as American men got heavier (so less able to carry a pocket device), the PDAs got bigger and heavier. Soon the PDA was pushed out of the pocket -- to compete with iPods (new), laptops (old) and phones (old). That's a lot of competition.
   
   
4. Palm lost its way in a series of bungles and mistakes. They also completely lost their original vision. The internet boom and bust didn't help.
   
   
5. Even as PDAs got big and costly, laptops got smaller and cheaper. If a computing device doesn't fit in the pocket, it might as well run OS X or XP.
   

So the market is going to go away for a while. It'll be back one day. We boomers desperately need a wearable (or pocketable) "brain" that's reliable, robust and integrated with the desktop -- a true PDA. It's going to take a few years for a new group of naive (meaning not bitter and crispy) users to emerge, and adopt a new PDA solution. Not a phone, but something that with a bluetooth earpiece that does VOIP communication and that can replace a phone. Not an iPod, but it will have a 100 GB internal drive and will play music. Not running HotSync, but perhaps SyncML. Not a BlackBerry, but it needs to work seamlessly with an Exchange server. With multiple input options and a good combination of both voice command, word recognition, and stylus interaction. Yes, and with a camera too.

Who knows, maybe it will come from Apple. Jobs isn't getting any younger. Soon he'll need a pocket brain ...

Update: for a typical tale of why the Palm platform died, see this post: Daily Gadget - My Love Affair is Over

Another free business idea: dynamic biometrics with a digital video peripheral

Faughnan's Tech: Facial recognition biometrics: static by cell phone and dynamic by desktop video

Like Apple's, for example.

Buying a cell phone - another market failure?

Amazon.com: Cell Phones: PCS Phone palmOne Treo 650 (Sprint)

I need a new cell phone. My old one, which I never liked, is falling apart. I figured I'd have a few options. Wrong. Amazon reviews capture what I'm seeing everywhere: poor design, poor reliability, poor customer experiences. It's a combination of a crummy service provider attitude (such as disabling key phone functionality to encourage purchase of high price services), lousy service provider customer support, and phones designed to sell rather than to provide a lasting value to the customer.

In other words, yet another market failure.

I'm going for the simplest possible phone with the fewest features, and using the Apple iSync compatibility list as a quick guide to clueful manufacturers.

Supreme Court bans juvenile executions -- Martian invasion completed

BBC NEWS | Americas | US court bans juvenile executions

The US Supreme Court has abolished the death penalty for those who commit murder when under the age of 18.

This is proof of an alien invasion; how else to explain this outbreak of rationality? The court was, of course, divided. At least they weren't debating the wisdom of executing 12 year olds, the question was for teens aged 16-18.

It's a slippery slope though. As O'Connor writes when arguing for execution:

One of the court's dissenting judges, Sandra Day O'Connor, argued that: 'Chronological age is not an unfailing measure of psychological development, and common experience suggests that many 17-year-olds are more mature than the average young 'adult'.

Indeed. I would not be surprised to learn that most murderers have the psychological maturity of an average 2 year old. Such speculations though lead us down into the depths of relativism, where humans go at peril of their most deeply held beliefs.

And now the Draft

"The Case for the Draft" by Phillip Carter and Paul Glastris: America can remain the world's superpower. Or it can maintain its current all-volunteer military. It can't do both.

With the election out of the way America is beginning to have two long delayed intelligent discussions (sigh). One is about the role of government in our society (social security transformation debate); this discussion might even eventually involve a discussion of "the problem of the weak".

The other discussion is about the Draft. (Capitalized by intent.)

I've posted on this a few times. I never bought the story that the Draft was not a cost-effective approach to building the military; there are many jobs required in a modern military that do not require elite combat skills or even combat capabilities. Some of these jobs could be best filled by drafting adults from ages 25 to 55, and giving them a few months of training in a new "support military" group.

I've also mentioned previously that I thought one of reasons Rumsfeld launched the invasion of Iraq with insufficient forces was that he knew there weren't enough forces to do it "right" (meaning three times as many soldiers). Rumsfeld tried the fudge the difference by carving Iraq up with Turkey, when that fell through he opted to go with what he had.

Now Phil Carter, a blogger, lawyer, journalist and veteran has written an article on the Draft with with Paul Glastris for the Washington Monthly. Here's the bottom line:

America's all-volunteer military simply cannot deploy and sustain enough troops to succeed in places like Iraq while still deterring threats elsewhere in the world. Simply adding more soldiers to the active duty force, as some in Washington are now suggesting, may sound like a good solution. But it's not, for sound operational and pragmatic reasons. America doesn't need a bigger standing army; it needs a deep bench of trained soldiers held in reserve who can be mobilized to handle the unpredictable but inevitable wars and humanitarian interventions of the future. And while there are several ways the all-volunteer force can create some extra surge capacity, all of them are limited.

The only effective solution to the manpower crunch is the one America has turned to again and again in its history: the draft. Not the mass combat mobilizations of World War II, nor the inequitable conscription of Vietnam—for just as threats change and war-fighting advances, so too must the draft. A modernized draft would demand that the privileged participate. It would give all who serve a choice over how they serve. And it would provide the military, on a "just in time" basis, large numbers of deployable ground troops, particularly the peacekeepers we'll need to meet the security challenges of the 21st century.

America has a choice. It can be the world's superpower, or it can maintain the current all-volunteer military, but it probably can't do both.

There's one very good reason that Bush/Rumsfeld don't want a Draft. They know that if we'd had a global Draft in place, involving the elite and their children, we still would have invaded Afghanistan -- but there's no way in hell we'd have invaded Iraq.

New York, New York - A Survey by the Economist

The town of the talk

The Economist has published a "survey" of New York City. They last did this in 1983. I have fond memories of adventures in the Manhattan of 1981, but it was a rough place then. It's changed. A few interesting tidbits from the series:

...The city's population has reached an all-time high of 8.1m, and a higher proportion of its people—over 36%—are foreign-born than at any time since the 1920s...the Dominican Republic provides the biggest chunk of immigrants, with a share of 13%. China comes next with 9%, then Jamaica with 6%. No other country has more than 5%...immigrants make up 43% of the city's labour force, including over a third of its workers in finance, insurance and property, over 40% in education, health and social services, more than half in restaurants and hotels, 58% in construction and nearly two-thirds in manufacturing.

... The residents of just 20 streets on the east side of Central Park donated more money to the 2004 presidential campaigns than all but five entire American states.

...One big reason why New Yorkers have been able to rescue their neighbourhoods, attract people and smarten up the city is a dramatic fall in crime, which began in the 1990s and continues apace. Once notorious for its threatening streets, graffiti-covered subways, drug-addled hobos and general air of menace, New York today—as its businessman-mayor, Michael Bloomberg, rightly never tires of saying—is the safest big city in America.

... at the end of last year, the median price of an apartment on the island was $670,000, over 15% higher than a year earlier and more than three times what it was in 1995, according to Miller-Samuel, a property consultancy. As Manhattan's established areas climb out of reach, young professionals colonise and upgrade other neighbourhoods. People are getting used to the idea of a $1m house in Harlem...

And about 9/11

... About a quarter of the office space in lower Manhattan—the country's third-largest business district—was destroyed, and 23 buildings damaged.

... About 40,000 people normally worked in the twin towers, and around 150,000 visitors passed through the World Trade Centre complex each day. At the time the first plane struck, at 8.46am, the offices were not even half full. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, between 16,200 and 18,600 people were in the towers, and around 87% of them escaped...

... Leave out the passengers and crew on the aeroplanes that were flown into the World Trade Centre, and about 2,600 people were killed in New York on September 11th 2001. Put that tragic number in perspective, and you can perhaps see how it is possible for New York to be a powerful magnet for talent, youth and energy once more. In 1990 there were 2,290 murders in the city; last year there were 566. Thus even if a September 11th were to occur every other year, the city would by one measure be quite a lot safer than it would be with crime at its 1990 level and no terrorism.