Tuesday, January 03, 2006
bosons go with forces, fermions with stuff
Bosons are immaterial. Bosons overlap, they hold things together -- or push them apart. They are Force particles. Photons are Bosons. The undiscovered Graviton is a Boson. The also undiscovered Higg's Boson is thought to provide things with Mass (mass = E/c**2).
Fermions, even though they inconveniently start with the letter F, they are "stuff". They take up space. They exclude one another. Protons, neutrons, electrons, mosts (all?) quarks and leptons are Fermions. They are "Firm".
Why are Fermions and Bosons called "particles" when Bosons are ephemeral? Bahh. I vote for banning the word "particle".
Monday, January 02, 2006
Lost Luggage Lessons
This time it wasn't security holding a bag, or the airline running out of room, or someone misfiling a bag. Our 3 kids were slow moving through Trudeau (Dorval's) endless aerobic corridors (the secret to Quebecois physique) and by the time we got to the carousel a harried traveler had grabbed the wrong bag -- ours.
It turned up in Toronto on Air Canada and was delivered to my parent's home. The airline did fine really, but the process is a royal pain. Here are a few tips I learned:
- Northwest has a web site for tracking lost luggage. I didn't see this on the lost luggage paperwork, it would have saved us some calls. I came across it by accident.
- The silly luggage tags airlines provide are shredded in transit about half the time. Put identification in the bag and buy tougher tags.
- All wheeled bags look alike to travelers impaired by age, disability, inexperience, stress, hunger, etc. Ribbons tear off. Duct tape won't adhere to many bags. I'm looking for brightly colored tough nylon cable ties -- a few in strategic places would have prevented loss of my wheeled bag.
- If a bag is lost for over 24 hours you can be reimbursed for up to $50 of "essentials". Unfortunately the list of "essentials" was last updated in 1950. A power adapter for my laptop is far more important than a clean shirt.
- Speaking of power adapters, when I lost the bag I started realizing how hard, if not impossible, it would be to replace some of the gear in it. Clothes are easy to replace, a G3 iBook AV cable may be impossible to find. Montreal is not a tiny city, but I found only one store that had an iBook power adapter on the premises. It's a pain, but these things need to be carried on.
- AAA and AMEX don't automatically provide lost luggage insurance. Homeowners does cover it, but we have a $1000 deductible. My AMEX card allows me to insure up to $500 for $5/flight or $39/traveler/year if the trip is charged to the same card. I'm not sure the insurance is worth it really; for me the problem is more the hassle of finding replacements than the insurance costs. Domestic coverage by airlines is pretty good, but international coverage sucks -- maybe $250 for a typical bag ($9/pound).
Lessons in business:
Bitter Brew - I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life. By Michael IdovIt's a great article. Tragically pastries are a money sink. I love pastries.
The failure of a small cafe is not a question of competence. It is a sad given. The logistics of a food establishment that seats between 20 and 25 people (which roughly corresponds to the definition of 'cozy') are such that the place will stay afloat—barely—as long as its owners spend all of their time on the job. There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home. There's an even more elegant version of that rule: Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close.
A place that seats 25 will have to employ at least two people for every shift: someone to work the front and someone for the kitchen (assuming you find a guy who will both uncomplainingly wash dishes and reliably whip up pretty crepes; if you've found that guy, you're already in better shape than most NYC restaurateurs. You're also, most likely, already in trouble with immigration services). Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let's say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.
Humans aren't good at oversight
Lax Oversight Found in Tests of Gene-Altered Crops - New York TimesNo surprises here. I'd have been amazed if it were otherwise. Humans aren't good at following boring rules. It takes onerous discipline and great fear to ensure rules are followed at airports, nuclear plants, in the military and in hospitals. There simply wasn't enough terror involved to make sure gene experimenters followed the rules.The Department of Agriculture has failed to regulate field trials of genetically engineered crops adequately, raising the risk of unintended environmental consequences, according to a stinging report issued by the department's own auditor.
The report, issued late last month by the department's Office of Inspector General, found that biotechnology regulators did not always notice violations of their own rules, did not inspect planting sites when they should have and did not assure that the genetically engineered crops were destroyed when the field trial was done...
We should stop the experiments, determine what rules are needed, and use the lessons of nuclear power to set the rules, the monitoring, and the consequences. Alas, the mega-corps that do this work donate far too much money to various senators to face any such risks.
Genetic data: Are there any so naive as to think laws will matter?
If there's anyone so naive as to think otherwise, they ought to consider the story of the Swedish biobank:
Medicine's new central bankers | Economist.comSimilarly, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which already runs one of the world's oldest university-based biobanks, plans to follow 500,000 Swedes for 30 years to gain new insights into depression, cancer and heart disease...
... The Swedish government, which created one of the world's first national biobanks in 1975—it now has at least a blood sample from all of its citizens—used a loophole to gain access to the biobank a couple of years ago, in order to track down a killer.
It was not, admittedly, a run-of-the-mill murder case. Anna Lindh, Sweden's popular foreign minister, was murdered in September 2003 at a department store. Although Lindh's murder was captured on closed-circuit television, it was ultimately a DNA match from the murder weapon, a knife, that provided the basis on which the leading suspect, Mijailo Mijailovic, a 25-year-old Swedish Serb, was convicted. The DNA sample used to place Mr Mijailovic at the scene came from the country's national biobank, which—unlike many of the research biobanks now being established—is not anonymous.
Mr Mijailovic's conviction was later overturned on the basis that he suffers from a psychiatric disorder, but damage to the claim of confidentiality made by Sweden's biobank was done nevertheless. “This must never happen again,” says Jan-Eric Litton of the Karolinska Institute biobank. “This is not and should not be the purpose of a biobank—the only purpose, and it is my great hope that all nations abide by and clarify this, is to understand disease and find ways to address it in all of its forms. Biobanks are the future—they are a unique opportunity if we manage them correctly.”
“While bioethical and regulatory worries about biobanks abound, lack of agreement on standards could prove to be a more immediate impediment.”But while limiting the use of biobanks to medical research sounds like a simple solution, grey areas abound. In January, Swedish lawmakers temporarily changed the law to allow access to the biobank in order to identify bodies of Swedish citizens killed in the Asian tsunami. That is arguably a non-medical use, but one that is harder to argue against: the samples were used to identify children, for whom dental records did not exist. As a biobank meeting held in Stockholm last May, and a follow-up meeting in Washington, DC, last month made clear, there is still no agreement about how to keep probing officials citing national security or other serious concerns out of the biobank vaults.
Sweden has strong privacy laws and traditions, but convicting an assassin was sufficient to sweep them away. This was an almost trivial temptation; imagine if the issue were identification of a suspected terrorist treated for smallpox ...
I think the Swedes should have resisted in the Lindh case, but I'd have made the same call in the Tsunami affair. The smallpox terrorist? Well, it depends. I do wish Bush were not in power.The point? We shouldn't fool ourselves. If the data is collected it will be used. The rule should be only to collect data that is truly valuable, and to allow citizens to opt out of data collection. (Of course even anonymous data can be used to trace people with a bit of cleverness.) Everyone must understand that this data will be used and abused; if one wishes to avoid that then don't collect the data in the first place.
Incidentally, I have mixed feelings about the interoperability standards for health records. There is something to be said about data being very expensive to access and move ...
Sunday, January 01, 2006
A million dollar bribe for Abramoff and DeLay
The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail (WaPo)A million dollars is serious bribe money. At least DeLay did not sell himself cheaply ...
The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.
During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.
Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).
Thursday, December 29, 2005
The evolution of social darwinism
The story of evolution taught me something (emphases mine):
Evolution | The story of man | Economist.comSpencer was the champion of the proto-Calvinist doctrine of Social Darwinism. So it turns out that Calvinism (the weak suffer because they offended God) preceded Social Darwinism (the weak must suffer because that's the way the race gets stronger) preceded Darwin (who was a compassionate man who suffered not a little). Historians of Science love this sort of thing.
...It was [Herbert] Spencer, an early contributor to The Economist, who invented that poisoned phrase, “survival of the fittest”. He originally applied it to the winnowing of firms in the harsh winds of high-Victorian capitalism, but when Darwin's masterwork, “On the Origin of Species”, was published, he quickly saw the parallel with natural selection and transferred his bon mot to the process of evolution. As a result, he became one of the band of philosophers known as social Darwinists. Capitalists all, they took what they thought were the lessons of Darwin's book and applied them to human society. Their hard-hearted conclusion, of which a 17th-century religious puritan might have been proud, was that people got what they deserved—albeit that the criterion of desert was genetic, rather than moral. The fittest not only survived, but prospered. Moreover, the social Darwinists thought that measures to help the poor were wasted, since such people were obviously unfit and thus doomed to sink.
Calvinism is again the state religion of Bush's America, and Social Darwinism is again the governmental philosophy (welfare only preserves the weak), but Darwin himself is forbidden. Odd.
How will the meme of social Darwinism next mutate?
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
A topical review of Quantum Mechanics
I've been personally spooked by the practical use of quantum entanglement in encryption. That's too much like hacking the universal calculator. It feels like we have some big shocks ahead.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Writing to learn: Blogs and and the worldmind
Scott Rosenberg's Links & CommentSo hobby blogs aren't merely a wasteful pile of vanity; they're also a learning exercise. Alas for me, the learning I may thus be doing has no obvious connection to income.
...If this is true -- and, based on my own experience, I believe it is -- then we can view the explosion of writing in weblogs, of millions of people mastering ideas by writing about them, and spinning narratives in order to fix them in memory, as a vast exercise in the pursuit of collective self-knowledge. Yes, of course there are heaps of trivial pursuits, too; they keeps things lively. Only puritans would wish to eliminate them.
On a slighly related tangent, however, I do think these blogs are doing something interesting in a different learning domain -- it feels as though blogs are amplifying, filtering, and extending the emergent intelligence of the net. Hence Google's affection for blogs; Google lives off the crude mind of the net. (also Adwords). If the net was a simple entity with a base IQ of 10 a few years ago, perhaps blogs have pushed it to 13 ...
Skynet cannot be far away :-).
Why Apple won't fix AirTunes -- is it the microwave?
It was very frustrating. The devils of Digital Rights Management, AirTunes fundamental inadequacy, and the lack of a fast-user-switching compatible tool for remote control of iTunes finally defeated me. SlimDevices and its ilk seemed like far better solutions, and I figured this spring I'd strip out the DRM on the music I paid for and switch to a non-Apple solution. At the moment though, my wife's Nano and some good playlists suffice.
Today I decided spring was too soon. I was streaming some music using AirTunes. A rare event, but I do it on occasion. All was well, until the music vanished. I wondered what was up; then I realized the microwave was running. It's not all that old a model, but it is death to our 802.11b LAN. That's bad for routine web work, but it's fatal for streaming music -- especially the minimally compressed AirTunes stream.
Maybe streaming MP3 or AAC directly, or enabling communication robustness (microwave resistance) would help. Or maybe wireless audio streaming won't really work until we switch to entirely new forms of wireless networking (ultra wideband, etc). If so, then this may explain why Apple has left AirTunes twisting in the wind ... They may have reason to believe it's not fixable.
How to Ship Anything
Handy to keep around in case you ever decide to set up a business that ships things: How to Ship Anything - Joel on Software.
The secret of happiness
And the days are getting longer too ...
Update 3/11/09: See also
Happiness is a selective memory (framing effects)
and
Manipulating memory by photo display
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Unleashing the NSA: The real story.
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York TimesI'm sure most journalists had the same thoughts I had, but of course they actually have to gather evidence. They moved very quickly to put this story together.
The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.
This is oddly reassuring -- because it makes sense. The "bypass FISA" story didn't hold water if the NSA was indeed targeting individuals. Echelon-style monitoring of all traffic, however, cannot be approved under existing law. It required an executive order.
The great thing about the Bushies is that they make conspiracy theories real, and whacky delusions almost plausible. The Patriot II debate this January should be quite interesting.
Hard drinks for men who want to get drunk fast
Ideological transformations and the elderly
Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | The real war on ChristmasThey are, of course, the same people. I would bet they are both very directed towards groupthink and tribalism. At one time that meant smoking pot in front of children [1], today it means taking O'Reilly as their guru. I would wonder too if both are desperately seeking simplicity, a trend that grows with age and the sadly normal senescence of the human brain (our brains are in bad shape by the time we hit retirement age).
...The thing is, though, I know better than to bring up politics with my dad. Ever since he started listening to talk radio for hours out of the day, he's slowly lost his ability to objectively look at the facts and draw his own conclusions. If Rush, Hannity, Dennis Prager or O'Reilly say it, my dad believes it as surely as he believes anything. Thanks to this abdication of rational thinking, both of my parents completely bought into the Swift Boat liars, still believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, and recently decided to move to Montana, which my mother described as 'the real America' to me and my siblings. When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor, my mom's impression of him, having worked with him as a model in the 1960s, mysteriously transformed from 'a steroid-shooting lech' to 'a total gentleman, who was always taking his supplements, which were injected in those days.'
They both ended up voting for Tom McClintock, not because Arnold was so clearly incompetent, but because he wasn't a 'real' enough Republican for them. These are the same people who took me to nuclear-freeze rallies almost every weekend when I was in elementary school. These are the same people who introduced me to the teachings of the Buddha and Gandhi. The same people who smoked pot in front of me, introduced me to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, and taught me to throw a Frisbee when all my peers were learning how to throw a football.
Is there anything new here? It's tempting to think of Rush and O'Reilly as new, but the hate mongers of the 1930s to 1950s did quite well with the same radio Rush and O'Reilly use. Imitation and the urge to emulate dominant tribe members is quintessentially human. Alas, senescence has always been with us. So, no, this is not new.
[1] Many of us, of course, drink wine in front of children. I suppose it's not so much the substance as the intent of its use; I still suspect his parents were demonstrating the judgment flaws that later led them to Bush. Of course by writing this article about his family, their son has demonstrated a similar lack of wisdom.