Boltzmann's brain hits the big Times

The New York Times that is.

In a reprise of John Tierney's NYT interview with Nick (we're in a simulation) Bostrum  Dennis Overbye writes about a topic featured in some of my favorite physics blogs - Boltzmann's brain ...

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times

...cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

CV fills in some more background

... The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology — one in which the low-entropy universe we see is a statistical fluctuation around an equilibrium state of maximal entropy...

In other words, the silliness of the naked flying space brain demonstrates that we don't understand entropy and the arrow of time.

CV uses the same Bayesian logic used by Bostrum to point out that if our current model of entropy were correct then it would be overwhelmingly likely that you are a Boltzmann's Brain and I don't exist...

... In the set of all such fluctuations, some brains would be embedded in universes like ours, but an enormously larger number would be all by themselves. This theory, therefore, predicts that a typical conscious observer is overwhelmingly likely to be such a brain...

CV concludes today's essay with a, to me, tantalizing comment ...

...So what are we to conclude? That our observed universe is not a statistical fluctuation around a thermal equilibrium state. That’s very important to know, but doesn’t pin down the truth. If the universe is eternal, and has a maximum value for its entropy, then we it would (almost always) be in thermal equilibrium. Therefore, either it’s not eternal, or there is no state of maximum entropy. I personally believe the latter, but there’s plenty of work to be done before we have any of this pinned down..

That last link is to an 207 CV article on how it all began.

Undecided voter? You're in bad company

It's a little secret of national politics that, past the primaries, 99% of the electorate with any significant connection to reality has made up their mind.

So all the advertising, all the spin, all the media manipulation -- none of it is for you or me. We're just in the way.

It's all for the undecided voter and for the intermittent non-voter -- two groups that overlap.

Cosmic Variance has just learned the bad news. Sean is young I think, so no shame in being naive. For obvious reasons this isn't something politicians talk about. They may despise the chore of selling themselves to the arational and illogical, but that's what the game is all about.

There's a bright side. The next time you hear an astoundingly idiotic campaign statement, remember who it's aimed at. Politicians are not as a stupid as they sound, they're just profoundly cynical.

John's head explodes: AT&T rebate paid with an AT&T debit card

My head just exploded.

Ok, so I knew when I did the deal with Satan's pond-sucking scum that I should expect a shaft or two, but this one is so audacious.

I just noticed, in a very fine print amongst all the paper work of a new cell phone contract, that AT&T pays its rebates with an AT&T debit card.

AT&T has been sued over this practice:

AT&T "Rebate" Case Going Forward - O'Reilly Emerging Telephony

...I also clearly remember my dismay at getting a VISA debit card as my “rebate” and the many hoops that I had to jump through to use it simply as a credit on my next Cingular bills...

More on the lawsuit -- so it went forward in 2007. There are a few web references to this topic, but I couldn't find anything new.

I'll see what the terms of use are on the cards we get and I'll update this post. It's likely I'll have the chance to fire off a letter to our state attorney general.

I so want Google to crush these leeches.

Update 3/24/2008: I get my cards, and consign the responsible exec to the eighth circle of Hell.

The BlackBerry Pearl is Android 0.8

So now I realize (see especially) what Google's been doing while they neglect Blogger, Google Apps, and most of their non-search properties.

They've been putting all their energy into mobile computing.

Yes, we all know about Google Android.

What I've not read is that the BlackBerry Pearl is a kind of Android 0.8 alpha. Interesting, since RIM is definitely not part of the Open Handset Alliance. Coopetition - at best.

I'd written elsewhere ....

Gordon's Tech: Nokia 6555b: the pleasant surprise, and its iSync Plug-in

...We've turned Emily's Blackberry Pearl into a proto-Android, and it works pretty well that way. So we have a data phone with Google Maps, Google Talk, Google Mail and some other odd Google things....

I've gone a bit further since doing that, including a visit to the Google BlackBerry mobile page and building a personal Google page for Emily's Blackberry. It all comes together in an interesting way.

Not that there aren't rough edges! Google has two parallel identity management systems -- one through Google App (like our family domain) and the well known Gmail network. In general the Google App services are one generation behind the Gmail services -- and poorly integrated at that. You can get the Gmail app for a family domain, but you can't get the personalized mobile search home page (google.com/ig). (I think it's also true that you can't embed a widget for the family domain Gmail app on a the personalized search page.)

My workaround for now has been to make my wife's family domain login the "email address" for a Gmail-suite account -- but without actually enabling a Gmail account! set. So she can use the mobile home page and a mixture of Gmail-class and Google-Apps class services on her BlackBerry.

Ok, so it's a bleedin' mess. Still, the result is the closest thing to Android available today. An interesting glimpse of what's ahead.

What planet am I on again?

Andrew Leonard sums it up.

Bill Gates feels businesses should seek profitable ways to improve "the poor". Lee Scott of Walmart wants to support international trade, address climate change and water shortages, and more.

I read the WSJ interview with Gates, and he comes across as a bit of a rube. On the other hand, he's a rather powerful rube. I'm glad he's trying. One day he may even take a look at the roots of American poverty, and the nature of disability in a post-industrial world.

The Walmart manifesto is odder; I think Scott may have OD'd on Ayn Rand. Still, no complaints from me.

It's likely coincidence, or a passing reaction to the bursting of our latest financial bubble. We can hope, however, that this is something better than charitable feelings.

We can hope this is the start of enlightened self-interest. If the wealthy and the powerful recognize that our world, physical and virtual, is much more fragile than it's seemed these past forty years, then we can start to make real progress towards "enlightenment 2.0".

Dog food blogging: CBC news story

Gee, before Google News I never read the Winnipeg StarPhoenix. Another story on the f/u to the melamine / cyanuric acid contaminated Chinese gluten episode:

Pets deserve better food standards: expert

To make a point about pet food, veterinarian Meg Smart brewed up a pot of leather boots, wood chips and motor oil.

"It would pass (Canadian) standards," she said about her concoction.

Smart, a nutrition expert from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, will be featured on a CBC documentary about the pet food industry on Thursday night.

"It's a complex system," said Smart about the industry. "Most diets aren't out there to harm animals. Most are adequate."

But many pet foods aren't adequate. In the spring of 2007, pet owners across North America watched as nearly 50,000 of their cats and dogs fell ill because of tainted food [1]. Menu Foods, a Toronto-based manufacturer, recalled all of their products containing contaminated wheat gluten, an ingredient the company imported from China.

Smart said these companies made a mistake and would never knowingly produce a dangerous product, but the ingredients used in the food may not be carefully monitored.

"I'd like to see a set of requirements, like for humans . . ." said Smart. "Or else, people have no way of knowing what they're feeding their pets."

Today, very few regulations exist for pet food. Leather boots contain enough nitrogen to pass Canadian standards. Wood chips contain enough fibre and carbohydrates. Motor oil contains enough fat.

Pet food ingredients are controlled and monitored by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, but they only monitor food manufactured in Canada. Most of the pet food Canadians purchase, around 85 per cent, is manufactured in the U.S.

So, what are you feeding your pet? Smart recommends people read food labels carefully because some pet food is well made.

Jason Skotheim has operated Horizon Pet Nutrition in Rosthern since the company started in 2004. He said his company is making sure the ingredients in their product are top quality and locally grown.

"We're trying to make this food like a Hundred Mile Diet for your dog," said Skotheim, referring to the popular diet book for humans.

His company sources all its ingredients and stays completely away from wheat gluten in favour of whole grains.

"Pets are part of the family unit," he said. "We want to make a premium pet food that people can trust."

Skotheim refers to small pet-food companies like Horizon as a cottage industry in Canada. Despite their competition from pet-food giants like Del Monte, Mars and Procter & Gamble, Horizon's business continues to grow.

Smart uses Horizon dry pet food for her dogs, but she says commercials are misleading when they say the food is recommended by veterinarians.

Small privately held companies can manage their services, and their reputations, in ways that large publicly held companies cannot. There's a lesson here that goes beyond my personal interest in Kateva's diet.

[1] I think that 50,000 number is suspect, though we'll never really know. The Wikipedia summary reports a US-only fatality rate in the hundreds, and I believe that was largely cats. Their urinary pH seemed to cause a greater formation of the melamine/cyanuric acid crystals and renal failure. Really though, there's no money to study this sort of thing.

Please stop the Vitamin E studies

Gee, this is so exciting ...

BBC NEWS | Health | Vitamin E 'may ward off decline': "Vitamin E may ward off physical decline in elderly people, research suggests."

Not.

I'm so tired of these case control studies fishing for results -- looks like they studied every possible vitamin in this one. Got a pub in JAMA and an article on the BBC and bloggers like me writing about it.

Just stop. There've been dozens (hundreds?) of these Vitamin E studies -- they never work out. On the other hand I recall some ominous results from studies of Vitamin E mega-dose therapy suggesting unexpected toxicity -- I liked that one.

I'm betting if there's any effect here that it's one or more of:

1. Something else with which serum Vitamin E levels are correlated.
2. Unrelated to diet; an expression of a genetic disposition associated with slower aging (but higher cancer rates).
3. Completely spurious.

Whatever, taking Vitamin E supplements won't help.

Oh, and here's the really irksome part:

.... Lead researcher Dr Benedetta Bartali said... "Our results suggest that an appropriate dietary intake of vitamin E may help to reduce the decline in physical function among older persons."

Saying things like that should get a researcher banned from publication for two years. Heck, life. It's the academic equivalent of the "boiled frog" analogy. Just stupid.

Wake me up when there's a persuasive animal model experimental study.

The iTunes Store fails to impress

My 11 yo son has $30 in birthday credit at the iTunes Store -- and nothing to spend it on.

This ain't a good sign.

In the past we'd buy episodes of TV shows -- mostly for watching on plane trips or other travels. With NBC gone the pickings look slim.

Movies? Nah -- very few options in the family movie department.

We could get a game, but they only play on my aging fifth generation iPod; not my iPhone to come.

We can't get music! DRMd music (AAC is fine, just not FairPlay) won't play on the SONY car stereo -- it's a real pain. We avoid it.

The least bad option, despite the DRM, will probably be an audio book, and maybe a small game on the side. That's tolerable for burning to CD or even re-recording if we need to dump the DRM.

Still, not such a great showing. No wonder Apple's share price is tanking* ...

* I consider this a great thing really. They've loads of cash, and a lower share price will reduce Apple's tendency to delusional arrogance. Please, no more Air Books.

How humane can humans be? Primate lesssons.

Robert Sapolsky has written another essay in the vein of a Foreign Affairs article he published in 2006. The focus, again, is the balance between culture (character) and biology (temperament) in non-human primates.

When I read the essay I think of how much humans have apparently evolved in the past 40,000 years, and a series of studies over the past few years that have stripped us of claims to some unique form of cognition.

Emphases mine.

Greater Good Science Center

Peace Among Primates
by Robert M. Sapolsky

... as field studies of primates expanded, what became most striking was the variation in social practices across species. Yes, some primate species have lives filled with violence, frequent and varied. But life among others is filled with communitarianism, egalitarianism, and cooperative child rearing.

Patterns emerged. In less aggressive species, such as gibbons or marmosets, groups tend to live in lush rain forests where food is plentiful and life is easy. Females and males tend to be the same size, and the males lack secondary sexual markers such as long, sharp canines or garish coloring. Couples mate for life, and males help substantially with child care. In violent species, such as baboons and rhesus monkeys, the opposite conditions prevail.

... although human males might not be inflexibly polygamous or outfitted with bright red butts and six–inch canines designed for tooth–to–tooth combat, it was clear that our species had at least as much in common with the violent primates as with the gentle ones. "In their nature" thus became "in our nature." This was the humans–as–killer–apes theory popularized by the writer Robert Ardrey, according to which humans have as much chance of becoming intrinsically peaceful as they have of growing prehensile tails.

...After decades' more work, the picture has become quite interesting. Some primate species, it turns out, are indeed simply violent or peaceful, with their behavior driven by their social structures and ecological settings. More importantly, however, some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and whether humans can manage the trick ourselves.

Two classic studies have shown that primates are somewhat independent from their "natures." In the early 1970s, a highly respected primatologist named Hans Kummer was working in a region of Ethiopia containing two species of baboons with markedly different social systems. Savanna baboons live in large troops, with plenty of adult females and males. Hamadryas baboons, in contrast, have a more complex and quite different multilevel society. When confronted with a threatening male, the females of the two species react differently: A hamadryas baboon placates the male by approaching him, whereas a savanna baboon can only run away if she wants to avoid injury.

Kummer conducted a simple experiment, trapping an adult female savanna baboon and releasing her into a hamadryas troop and trapping an adult female hamadryas and releasing her into a savanna troop. The females who were dropped in among a different species initially carried out their species–typical behavior, a major faux pas in the new neighborhood. But gradually, they absorbed the new rules. How long did this learning take? About an hour. In other words, millennia of genetic differences separating the two species, a lifetime of experience with a crucial social rule for each female—and a miniscule amount of time to reverse course completely...

The essay goes on to describe additional research demonstrating not only that aggressive primates can behave well, but that under some conditions the new behaviors can become established and communicated across generations.

Sapolsky seems to be in part responding to those who think humans are irredeemably prone to aggressive xenophobia. I don't think that belief is very credible, however -- and I'm no fan of humans! To that end then the essay is overkill.

On the other hand, for us to survive the next fifty years we will have to do far more than be civil. We will need "enlightenment 2.0", an unprecedented ability to get outside of our our personal world. Sapolsky is providing support for the desperate belief that humans can rise to the challenge.

The S&P is down 15%, back to Jan 2007

It's so annoying that reporters quote daily point drops in the Dow. What I want to know is how far the S&P is off a recent reasonable peak.

As of this AM the answers (by the Yahoo graph) are:

• down 15% from November 2007
• back roughly to Jan 2007

So it's given up about a year's growth. If it keeps falling I'll probably be obliged to start making regular purchases on the way down.

I wish these things would happen before my mutual funds charge me capital gains.

The Atlantic and archives to be ad supported

A remarkable story in several ways.

One, James Fallows, who is a big name in The Atlantic, claims to have learned about the change in NYT. Secondly, the move will include the entire archives - a fabulous addition reminescent of the opening of the vast NYT archives.

High school civics, between Wikipedia and the archives, really should be getting very interesting.

Lastly, there's a lot of material here for students of modern media.

It seems the switch was driven by the circulation of The Atlantic's blogs, the advertising they might attract, and the turmoil at the journal:

NYT: “... The magazine is still in the red, in the $3-to-$5-million range,” he said, but he hopes to be in the black in five years.

The Atlantic seems to have stabilized after a period of turmoil. The previous editor in chief, Michael Kelly, stepped down in 2002, and the owner, David G. Bradley, left the post vacant for more than three years...

While the managing editor, Cullen Murphy, ran the magazine, it won numerous awards for excellence but circulation dropped sharply. In 2005, Mr. Bradley moved The Atlantic from Boston, where it was founded in 1857, to Washington, leading Mr. Murphy and many other staff members to leave.

For a few months, it seemed that no one was in charge, until Mr. Bennet was hired less than two years ago.

When I finally gave up on the doddering Economist about two years ago, I replaced it with Scientific American and The Atlantic. I've generally been very pleased by the magazine, I'm surprised it's losing money but encouraged by the apparent energy and direction.

Gordon's 4 laws of acquisition

Contemplation of Apple's time capsule has reminded me of Gordon's 4 rules of acquisition.

Well, actually, none of them are mine really. I'll just lay claim to this particular arrangement. Credit goes to the forgotten sources that gave us the memes, and life that proved them true.

1. Never acquire anything until you really, really, want it -- three separate times.
2. The real cost is the lifetime cost, from acquisition to disposal. Or, as per a recent NYT post, think subscription -- not ownership. In the modern world we don't own, we subscribe to something that's neither inert nor living. The purchase price is often the least of things.
3. Don't buy on promises or potential. Acquire for real value now. Anything in the future is a plus (or, sometimes, a minus).
4. Don't buy more than you can consume now. We all have fixed resources to acquire and adopt new things; acquisitions that sit on the shelf depreciate very quickly.
   

The rules work for acquiring a scanner or a corporation, though corporations may have more leeway with #3. I suppose, with a minimal tweak or two, they work for marriage too.

Rule #3 didn't used to be true of computers. In the days when our computers were open platforms, we could reasonably expect that the market would meet our needs. That's obviously not true for Apple's increasingly closed products; whether it's an Airport Extreme*, Time Capsule*, an iPod, an Air Book or an iPhone. It's also true for Windows however -- there will never be a real alternative to Microsoft Office on Microsoft's platform.

* Alas, how much better these things would be if Firewire had not been eliminated by the far inferior USB 2.0 interface. Another story though.

PS. Ever notice that no-one does a list of "four" things? Three, yes. Ten, yes. Never four. Until now ...

The puzzle of cetacean brains

When I was a child there was a lot of excitement about dolphin brains and dolphin language. It didn't seem to go anywhere, but the cognitive sciences have been moving onwards.

In an era where almost every aspect of thought that seemed purely human has been found to be commonplace, it's time to reexamine the cetacean brain.

Scientific American features a brief review of the science. In short, there's no obvious neuro-anatomic reason to suppose that cetaceans should be less "clever" than humans. Indeed, sperm whales ought to be prodigies of thought.

So why do they need such massive brains? Those calorie sucking engines require an immense amount of food; sperm whale brains ought to be doing something to justify their costly upkeep.

But what?

Canada wimps out

Sad. I'd expected better of Canada.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Canada FM regrets 'torture list'

...The Canadian foreign minister has apologised for including the US and Israel on a list of states where prisoners are at risk of torture.

Maxime Bernier said the list, which formed part of a manual on torture awareness given to diplomats, 'wrongly includes some of our closest allies'."...

Huckabee's constitutional amendment

I missed this during a few days in Manchester (UK).

Huckabee wants to change the US constitution

...but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view....

That makes sense. If one truly believes that one's particular deity desires a particular world order, then there's no choice but to enforce that order.

Jimmy Carter, who was and is deeply religious, believed that his deity didn't want to work that way, so he left the constitution alone.

George Bush is probably confused, some days thinking one way of his deity, and other days thinking another way. Introspection is not his strength.

Huckabee is not confused, he's a warm and fuzzy hard core fundamentalist theocrat.