Archive for September, 2005
September 25, 2005 at 10:42 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Remember being taught about the six simple machines? Like the wedge, the inclined plane, the screw? We were taught about them in elementary school, probably around age 10.
So perhaps my memory fails in the reddening light of early middle age: Where’s my hammer? On the list, I mean? The one you use to hit things with.
My wife points out she thinks it’s a “tool” not a “machine”. Shyeah, right, and a ramp is a machine how? Because you do so much with it?
If a ramp is a machine for moving mass against an energy gradient, then dammit a hammer is a machine for increasing the impulse applied to a fixed object. Or something like that.
September 23, 2005 at 7:33 am · Filed under Uncategorized
So now four people, all I think rather smarter than I am, have asked me what statistics books to read.
I think these folks are projecting something more than is warranted onto my recent point touching on statistics: They seem to think I know better! Haha! Alas, I am as dumb as a sack of wet hammers when it comes to modern statistics, having been crippled in my youth with an incident involving DEC PDP teletypes and Minitab [yes, I am that old.]. I am still wrestling with the effects of second-hand two-tailed p-value abuse, and though I retain substantial use of my elementary probability theory, I have a seriously diminished capacity to fathom any statistical process involving greek symbols or vertical lines (|).
My one scant advantage is that I recognize that I have a problem. And that I like pretty graphs with lots of squiggly lines and colors, which apparently abound in machine learning texts and papers, and always seem to me to be fraught with powerful and convincing implications about both the model and the explanatory acumen of the authors. [Wait; is that last one an advantage?]
Ah, but lacking a blue handicapped hang-tag for my desk. I have, in fact, paid good money to the esteemed Dr. Shalizi to tell me important statistical stuff [he advised me on a consulting gig]. Perhaps if we all ask him pointedly, he can suggest a reasonable course of action?
September 23, 2005 at 6:50 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Why don’t more people know about (and use) genetic programming, especially for symbolic regression? GP is an approach that can be useful in all sorts of domains, for problems ranging from exploratory data analysis to design automation. SR can be a subtly informative complement to statistical modeling projects, or it can be used as a monstrously powerful open-ended exploratory machine learning engine. It rocks.
So. Do you know anything about it? [Cheating has been discouraged by eliminating outbound links from this post.]
This has become a problem for me. In seven conversations in two weeks with colleagues about work, including bosses and peers, I’ve mentioned or advised or absolutely insisted they consider GP/SR. In one case my opposite knew about GP but hadn’t considered it because he only knew about pole-balancing and stuff; in four cases they thought I was talking about genetic algorithms for parameter optimization (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but… no); in two cases I suppose they thought “symbolic regression” meant something ickily statisticky, and didn’t want to go down that road, so they played like it was some fancy newfangled numerical regression technique fad-of-the-day. Then, yesterday, in a room full of people using fast but utterly opaque SVMs to do machine learning, where the goal is to understand the system, they had thought about neither Bayesian networks nor GP/SR, both of which could tell them important things about how the system works. And in this latter case they hadn’t ever heard of SR.
I suppose now I have to do something about it.
Sigh. More in a while.
September 21, 2005 at 9:14 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
OK. So let’s suspend our judgement and accept for a moment that the pace of innovation is, in fact, increasing exponentially. So it’s not that we have a limited understanding of the real scope of innovation in the actual world, especially where it stretches beyond our immediate experience. And not that we all simply hear more these days about what has actually been happening all along, since we have a few modern contrivances like news and BoingBoing and stuff. No, let’s assume the world is producing more innovative thingies. Faster. OK?
So. Is the adoption of those innovative thingies keeping pace? Is the rate of adoption of innovation speeding up exponentially? Because we’re assuming here that for every Really Good New Idea that appears this month, ten new Even Better ideas will appear next month. So I need to be a pretty perky adopter of new ideas, right?
Otherwise… well, where do ideas nobody hears about go?
I just today sat in two lectures on Queuing Theory, so maybe I’m hopelessly mired in the dregs of defunct industrial civilization. But, um, doesn’t somebody still have to make this stuff? Otherwise, won’t it, like, back up in piles until somebody pays attention to it?
Until, that is, we have self-making stuff. Besides, well… you know… the self-making stuff that lives on the planet already, I mean.
Or does the Singularity really just represent a deeply ramified crisis for mail-order catalog publishers and marketing?
No, seriously. If there are more ideas all the time (maybe, but I doubt it), and more information is washing over all of us all the time (I doubt that even more), then are we adopting and executing those ideas? Are we changing our fundamental behavior to cope with all the new information? Are we all becoming different from one another?
What, we aren’t already?
Caveat: Charles Stross’s Accelerando is a really, really good book that I recommend wholeheartedly.
September 21, 2005 at 7:46 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
One reason Kurzweil’s charted prediction of the Singularity is suspiciously extra-super-singular::
I’ll tell you why. Because not only is the chart an artificial and perhaps even conscious attempt to fit the data to a predetermined conclusion, but what it actually represents is the proximity of the familiar. We are much more aware of innovations in our current time and environment, and the farther back we look, the blurrier the distinctions get. We may think it’s a grand step forward to have these fancy cell phones that don’t tie you to a cord coming from the wall, but there was also a time when people thought it was radical to be using this new bow & arrow thingie, instead of the good ol’ atlatl. We just lump that prior event into a “flinging pointy things” category and don’t think much of it. When Kurzweil reifies biases that way, he gets garbage, like this graph, out.
There’s a worse flaw yet, actually, in the whole backward-facing extravaganza. These “paradigm shifts” that keep cropping up? So these are supposedly the equivalent of phase transitions in potential, yes? Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction and so forth? In with the wireless, out with the shirtwaist factories; in with the linguistic finesse and effectiveness of moderne fuckin’ English, and out with illiterate babble of childish… well, everybody else in the world. Paradigm shift — um, that’s when everybody gives up what they was doin’, and starts on the good stuff. Right?
There are always Late Adopters. Alas, the Late Adopters in these cases can be very late indeed. Check it out: “Eukaryotic cells”! says the chart early on (except there’s way more bacteria, still); “Class Mammalia”! (except there’s way more beetles still); “Human ancestors walk upright”! (just like a lot of dinosaurs, and all birds. Hey, everybody else! Get with the times! Falling forward off-balance is the Way to Rule the World!).
How’s that deep argument go? The one often used by those other clear-headed thinkers? “If I’m descended from a monkey, then how come there are there still monkeys?”
Maybe the folks who invoke that sparkling bit of wit, and the Singularity Now folks, they should talk. I detect intellectual lacunae they seem to share. What’s the word? Anthro… something. Anthropo– Shoot; tip of my tongue.
What is that word? Something about middles. About the feeling that you — or your demographic group, or your race, or your species — are the vital gateway through which the past will realize the future.
It’s that feeling everything being about you. Anthropo… something. Blast.
Oh yeah! Hubris.
(This, by the way, is also about you. But in a different way.)
September 21, 2005 at 11:09 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Viz: Proof by Successive Contraindication
Begin the proof in front of a large attentive audience. Listen to the audience reaction as you transcribe the proof onto the black- or whiteboard. Whenever the audience makes contraindicative noises above a predefined threshold, roll back the proof to the point where the noises began, and proceed in a slightly different direction from there. Repeat as necessary, until the concluding point of the proof is reached, or a Socratic Pedagogic Deficit [Cf.] is about to occur. If you detect that an SPD is about to occur, leave the remainder of the proof to the audience as an exercise.
Socratic Pedagogic Deficit: In a lesson taught by the Socratic Method, the amount by which the positive pedagogic value of leaving the “real” answers ambiguous is exceeded by the confusion caused by leaving them ambiguous.
September 18, 2005 at 10:44 am · Filed under Uncategorized
You would need to know what Magic: The Gathering is, I suppose.
But still worth a look — before WOTC comes along and kneecaps them….
September 18, 2005 at 10:16 am · Filed under Uncategorized
In my experience, a large majority of smart and well-trained people (who should know better) don’t have any clear idea of what it’s like inside a cell. I blame this squarely on biochemistry pedagogy, with its unmentioned but implicit linearization of chemical reaction kinetics and tacit assumption that everything can be separated into functioning components and studied separately: we are taught (and have taught, when we were doing that sort of thing) that all molecules always bump into each other in isolated pairs, and have plenty of time and space to associate and dissociate as they wish in their intracellular environment. One that’s fundamentally no different from a test tube of dilute pure molecules we study in the lab. That leads to the supposition that we can infer from laboratory measurements of such pure test cases, where we actually assign numbers to properties of pure dilute macromolecules, what behavior that depends on KD or KI will be like inside a cell. We assume that because the natural length scales of supramolecular complexes are so much larger than those of chemical reaction and association events, long-range structure has little or no implication for what happens on the scale of the event.
Which is pure bullshit.
Such a premise is tantamount to imagining that the contents of cells are perfectly mixed. If this strikes you as a not-unreasonable modeling assumption, especially for mathematical tractability, I invite you to randomize the contents of some of your cells and see how they do. A blender will do in a pinch.
I haven’t had the pleasure of this rant in a few months, but I was about to start writing about it in the context of Synthetic Biology and wrong-headed notions of design. And I will. But I needed a little jostle to jump-start me. So it is with pleasure that I’m reminded of David Goodsell’s extraordinary work on this subject, by way of a link from BioCurious to “PDB Molecule of the Month: Cholera Toxin”.
If you want to make a positive difference in our lives, by undermining incorrect myths held by biomedical practitioners, send a friend to this stunning work of science and art (be sure to click the three-panel graphic to see it at mind-numbing size). Ask them how much water there is in between those molecules. Ask them how metabolism works, in light of those networks. Ask your biochemistry (or general biology) grad student to point out where they would expect to find the Krebs cycle they draw in simplified circles-and-arrows format on the board in the first week of class — right there, on that map. [It may be a trick question, for that particular picture] Then, while they’re pondering, ask them quickly, “OK. This is easier — how does the information from the genome get from over there, to over here?”
I think that image, along with Dr. Goodsell’s other portfolio on this theme, is probably the most important work of scientific art for this century, and should be plastered up on the wall of any lab that’s doing anything in any setting that involves intracellular molecular dynamics and cellular physiology.
But that’s just me. What do you think?
September 17, 2005 at 11:12 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
(And if you do think it’s questionable to lie, then I suppose it’s even better to just be lazy and stupid.)
A creationist defends his lackadaisical know-nothing ignorance about matters of fact so glibly, it hurts:
You are correct in that there are 30 total animal phyla; I was writing a piece to explain this concept to a general audience, and I included the chordates plus insects. You, as a revered Professor of Biology, may find my pique with my carelessness. Fine(after all, I`m not a biologist). Nonetheless, it does not matter to the argument wether there are 2, 8, 15, 30, or 2000 phila (ouch! my knuckles!); the point is that we there was no real crossovers between creatures. I suspect you understood my point, but quibble over it because you think you`ve got me. If it salves your ego to gloat, go right ahead! The fact is, the great point you think you scored was wide of the argument.
Heh. “The argument.” There was an argument? I figured it was just a bunch of wrong stuff.
Seriously. I said something like this before, PZ: These people only appear to be talking to you. They’re not. They’re signaling one another, counting coup and racking up points in an enigmatic and fundamentally irrational social ritual that means something only in their subculture. This fellow now can go off and say how he bested you, no matter how much a fool he has actually made of himself, because he isn’t trying to make a point to you, or convince you of anything.
The evidence is right there on the page: no sane person could mistake such an exchange for an attempt to convince you. He’s talking to somebody else, and he’s declaring something to them: his membership in their tribe, his faith and martyred pride, his superiority to worldly intellectuals and niggling artificialities we think of as “facts”, his strength in the face of the Bad Thing you represent.
You, the nominal correspondent, are irrelevant.
September 17, 2005 at 10:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
There has to be a good use for this.
[click for original image]
Published in 1913, this thrilling tale of adventures includes “Boy Scouts in a Coal Mine” and “Boy Scouts in Alaska”, plus the mysteriously engaging short story “Black Art in Cincinnati”. But do you really care? I do… but do you?
So: Go, thou sophomoric PoMo remixer, and make something of the picture. I see t-shirts. I see posters. I see an entire Band Name, plus the cover of their first album.
[the actual book has already been scanned, and is being munged into the appropriate format for Distributed Proofreaders. Watch over at Odd Ends for more info, especially our project database.]
September 17, 2005 at 5:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Leiter Reports: Guest Bloggers Benjamin Hellie and Jessica Wilson, Sept. 12-16: Our first encounter with socialized medicine.
This matches our experience of medicine in the Netherlands, too. But we also had doctors wiling to make house calls. But we also had doctors working under supposition that staying home until you feel better is a good thing.
I dread our doctors in Ann Arbor. My mother’s doctors are (except for her Dutch rheumatologist) too busy to spend more than 10 minutes with her, explicitly refuse to coordinate with one another, and cannot remember what they have said or prescribed from visit to visit. Which visits are often months apart, because of delays in scheduling.
We are being bilked; so, alas,are the doctors themselves. We were being charged $800/month for this degree of mismanaged non-service, the last time we paid for it.
And what exactly for? Risk?
Ours? Not likely. Some combination of the doctors’ legal risks, and the Pharmas’ product development and marketing risks, more likely.
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[click for original image]
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